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Holly smoke! now I know why I should have listened to my teachers when I was in school. I am so far over my head in this fossil and rock thing that my eyes hurt thinking about it. I do mostly river hunting here in VA. and until I came across this site my life was normal, now I'm not sure about anything. It seems now I have more questions than answers. Walking the banks of the James river looking for arrowheads I always seem to come home with more different looking rocks than I do arrowheads. Picking up rocks that look like they may be arrowheads but are not got me to wondering. One question is, is there a fossil hunting for dummies thingy anywhere? One of my sons likes to look for shark teeth and I go with him some times to walk the river banks. One of my questions is, do all real shark teeth look like the pretty little black and grey colored things he always brings back or could a tooth be completely turned to stone like river rock you see along the bank of a stream. Also is it possible to find a tooth in a sediment layer, like so called mud rock that is shaped exactly like those pretty ones that everybody else finds but is just a blob of the same material that its encased in? I was digging a couple buckets of of that sediment layer to use for planting material when I noticed something strange looking in the soil. It was getting dark and we had to leave to get back. A day or two later when I dumped out one of the buckets I noticed bone fragments and what looked to be parts of some kind of vertebrae. Out of the three buckets I collected there was over a bucket full of these bone like pieces and a lot of pieces that had the shape of teeth but were just a mass of the grey sediment looking material. Hopefully I will get to go back to the site later to find out what I have destroyed and to see what else may be there.......but more carefully this time I promise. I'm going to try and get some pics of some of the things but my camera battery is dead and I have to get a new one. When I do post pictures it will be in the fossil ID page.

I'm curious about assigning ages to various strata. As far as I am aware, much of what we know was derived from the fact that "fossil species change the deeper one goes in a sedimentary layer, with newer fossils above older fossils". It makes a nice story. However, one can take a drive across the USA and find surface deposits from all eras- as noted on any geologic survey. I assume that means there were always surface finding from all previous eras during every geologic eras, and the mixing always continues to occur. I die in Utah and could be buried in Ordovician mud in Millard county, or buried by a Jurassic diplodocus at Dinosaur. The amount of mixing in all areas must be tremendous, not to mention continual upheavals. How many observations does it take to establish clean data? How much wiggle is there? How does one assign error bars to the data?

I posted a couple things here in another thread. I thought it would be good to have 'one-stop shopping' for this fascinating subject. So what is taphonomy? It is the study of the processes (as burial, decay, and preservation) that affect animal and plant remains as they become fossilized. It can be used to discern the paleoecology of the organisms as well as the sedimentary processes that led to their preservation.