This power point includes geologic locations of where certain fossils can be found. It also contains the five types of fossils! xo-Grace

1. All About Fossils
By: Grace Vogel
May 5, 2015
Grade 6

2. Fossils.
-Fossils are the remains and traces of living things in rock
-There are five types of fossils; molds and casts, carbon
films, trace fossils, and preserved remains
-Most are formed in sedimentary rock
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3. Molds and Casts
Casts and molds are a type of fossil where the physical characteristics are
printed onto rocks.
Molds:
- form when hard parts of an organism are buried in sediment such as sand,
silt, or clay
- hard parts dissolve over time and leave behind the hollow shape of an
organism
Casts:
- result of a mold
- dissolved minerals and sediment fills the hollow area of the mold
- minerals and sediment that are left make the cast
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⬆This ammonite cast
was discovered in the
United Kingdom

4. Preserved Remains
Some organisms get preserved in or close to their original state.
Ways in can happen are…
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Tar: An organism, for example, a mammoth,
gets trapped
in a tar pit and dies. The tar soaks into the
mammoth’s
bones and stops them from decaying.
Amber: An organism, most likely an insect, gets
trapped in the trees
sticky tree resin and dies. More resin covers it sealing
the bug inside. It hardens into the amber.
Ice: An organism, such as a wooly mammoth,
dies in a very
cold area. Its body freezes into the ice and
preserves
La Brea tar
pit fossil
Los, Angeles
California
￩
praying
mantis
in Dominican
amber from the
Dominican
Republic
￩
Human
remains found
in Bolzano,
Italy
￩

5. -The word petrified means “turned to stone”
-Forms when minerals replace part of or all of
an organism
-Water contains lots of dissolved minerals. It
seeps through the layers of sediment and
reaches the dead organism. When the water
evaporates, only the hardened mineral are
left behind.
Petrified Fossils
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Petrified wood
found in Petrified
Forest National
Park in Arizona

6. Trace Fossils
- Shows the activities of organisms
- Animals make footprints when they
step in mud or sand
- Over time the footprint is buried by
layers of sediment, the sediment then
becomes solid rock
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This trace fossil is a
dinosaur
footprint and was found
in Namibia, Africa

7. Carbon Films
- all living things contain the element
carbon
-When an organism dies and is later
buried in sediment, the materials that
break up the organism break down
-eventually only carbon remains
-Once the thin layer of carbon is the only remains it shows
delicate patterns such as the pattern of a leaf
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Leaf with insect damage
found in Ellsworth
County, Kansas

8. Resources
http://pages.stat.wisc.edu/~ifischer/Collections/Fossils/fossils.html
http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/fossils/Amber
http://www.nps.gov/pefo/learn/nature/fossils.htm
http://teacher.scholastic.com/scholasticnews/magazines/scienceworld/assets/S
W-POWERPOINT-FOSSILS.ppt
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