This lesson teaches you about the fossil record. It explains how scientists learn about Earth’s distant past and highlights what fossils can tell scientists about ourselves and other organisms.
What Is the Fossil Record?
Earth is approximately four billion years old. How long have people been around? The consensus among the scientific community is that modern humans have roamed the earth for about 200,000 years.
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What that means is that modern humans have missed 99.99% of Earth’s history! So, how can a species that’s arrived only recently possibly understand what organisms existed before our arrival? The key to our understanding resides in the fossil record. The fossil record is a huge collection of fossils that document the history of life on Earth.
Fossil Record Examples
The fossil record is filled with example organisms from Earth’s past. We’re going to touch on three fossil records that should be of interest to most people: dinosaurs, horses, and ourselves.Our first example, the dinosaurs, went extinct around 65 million years ago.
Extinct means that all members of a species or another grouping of organisms have died off. Therefore, everything we know about dinosaurs comes from the fossil record. Their size, shape, and even certain behaviors, like predation, can be learned through the study of their fossils. Remember that fossils can be impressions in rock, preserved mineral deposits in the shape of bone, footprints in volcanic ash, or other preserved prehistoric material.This impression of a small dinosaur skeleton is part of the fossil record.
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The final example is that of modern humans.
Our fossil record can teach us about our own origins. For example, if you take all the fossils of modern humans that have ever been found, where do you suppose the oldest ones come from? The answer is Africa! That means that Africa is likely the ancestral home to all modern humans. The second oldest modern human fossils come from Asia and Europe, and then finally the Americas.
This fossil record tells the story of humanity’s migration out of Africa and toward all corners of the globe.
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Lesson Summary
We can learn a lot about past and present organisms through the fossil record. The fossil record is a collection of fossils documenting the history of life on Earth. These fossils can teach us about an extinct organism’s size, shape, and/or behavior. Extinct means that all members of a species or another grouping of organisms have died off.
Fossil records can also allow us to learn how an organism evolved over time, or about our own origins and migration patterns throughout the world. Learning about these things, or anything from Earth’s past, would be incredibly difficult—if not impossible—without the fossil record.
