1. Chapter 8: Fossils in Geological Context

2. Key Terms
Paleontology: the study of extinct organisms, based on their fossilized remains.
Fossils: the preserved remnants of once-living things, often buried in the ground.
Geology: the study of Earth systems.
Taphonomy: the study of what happens to the remains of an animal from the time of death to the time of discovery.
Strata: layers of rock.
Stratigraphy: the study of rock layers and the sequence of events they reflect.

3. Formation of Fossils

4. Strata

5. Issues?

6. Geological Time Scale
Geological Time Scale (GTS): the categories of time into which Earth’s history is usually divided by geologists and paleontologists: eras, periods, epochs.

8. First appearance of mammals?
Test question

9. How old is it?
Provenience: the origin or original source (as of a fossil).
Relative dating techniques: dating techniques that establish the age of a fossil only in comparison to other materials found above and below it.
Lithostratigraphy: the study of geologic deposits and their formation, stratigraphic relationships, and relative time relationships based on their lithogic (rock) properties.
Tephrostratigraphy: a form of lithostratigraphy in which the chemical fingerprint of volcanic ash is used to correlate across regions.
Biostratigraphy: relative dating technique using comparison of fossils from different stratigraphic sequences to estimate which layers are older and which are younger.

10. Cont.
Calibrated relative dating techniques: techniques that use regular or some what regular processes that can be correlated to an absolute chorology to estimate the age.
Geometric polarity time scale: time scale composed of the sequence of paleomagnetic orientations of strata through time.
Paleomagnetism: the magnetic polarity recorded in ancient sediments. Reversed or normal direction used to correlate with the geometric polarity time scale to infer age in a site.

11. Chronometric Dating Techniques

12. Piltdown Break

13. A Few More Techniques
Radiocarbon dating: radiometric technique that uses the decay of 14C in organic remains such as wood and bone to estimate the time since death of the organism.
Electronic trap: radiometric techniques that measure the accumulation of electrons in traps in the crystal lattice of a specimen.
Electon spin resonance (ESR): electron trap technique that measures the total amount of radioactivity accumulated by a specimen such as tooth or bone since burial.