Title: Fossils
1Fossils
Tell of Long Ago
2Fossils are animals or plants that lived a very
long time ago.After they died, they turned to
stone.
3How do animals and plants become fossils when
they die?
Most dontthey just rot and disappear, often in
swampy forest soil called peat.
4Sometimes leaves fall in the peat. The leaf may
rot away, but the mark of its shape is left.
The peat with the leaf hardens into a rock,
called coal. Coal is a fossil too.
5Sometimes animals die and only their bones are
left, covered in mud.
Thousands of years go by, the mud piles up in
layers and the weight of the mud presses down on
the bones. The mud turns to rock.
6As that happens, ground water seeps through the
changing layers of mud.
7Minerals are dissolved in the water.
The water seeps into all the tiny holes in the
fish bones.
8After a very long time the bones turn to stone
and become a fossil.
9Some fossils are actual parts of plants or
animals that have turned to stone.
Sometimes a fossil is only an imprint of a plant
or an animal.
10Not all fossils are found in stone.
Some are found in the frozen ground of the
Arctic, like the bones of the ancient mammoth.
11Millions of years ago, a fly was caught in the
sticky sap of a tree.
The sap hardened and became a fossil known as
amber. The fly was preserved in the amber.
12We can learn many things from studying fossils.
Fossils tell us about the past.
13More About Fossils(right-click to open
hyperlink)
- How fossils are made
- What is a fossil?
- What makes a fossil movie
- Fossil Horses in Cyberspace
- Introduction to the Annelida
- Open Court Reading 2002, Level 2, Unit 4
- Created by Carol Potter, 2005