The fossils on Bell Island are the preserved remains, or traces of remains, of ancient organisms. The fossils are not the remains of the organism itself, but are rocks. The fossils can preserve an entire organism or just part of one and can be very large or very small.
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- [REQUIRED] Please post a photo in your log of yourself or a personal item at the beach to prove you visited the site.
- Study the rocks along the cliff. Do you think there are Trace Fossils or Body Fossils?
- What do you think made the fossil impressions?
Fossilization
Fossilization is the process of remains becoming fossils and its occurence is rare as most organisms decompose fairly quickly after they die. For an organism to be fossilized, the remains typically need to be covered by sediment soon after death. Sediment of fossils can include the sandy seafloor, lava, and even sticky tar.
Over time, minerals in the sediment seep into the remains. The remains become fossilized. Fossilization usually occur in organisms with hard, bony body parts, such as skeletons, teeth, or shells. Soft-bodied organisms, such as worms, are rarely fossilized.
Sometimes, however, the sticky resin of a tree can become fossilized. This is called fossilized resin or amber. Amber can preserve the bodies of many delicate, soft-bodied organisms, such as ants, flies, and mosquitoes.
Along the top of the cobble beach are broken layers of dark, rusty brown siltstone being eroded at the base of the grassy hillside. The siltstone fragments fall onto the grey, rounded beach cobbles. The contrast makes it easy to pick through the fragments in search of trace fossils.
Body Fossils vs Trace Fossils
The fossils of bones, teeth, and shells are called body fossils. Most dinosaur fossils are collections of body fossils.
Trace fossils are rocks that have preserved evidence of biological activity. They are not fossilized remains, just the traces of organisms. The imprint of an ancient leaf or footprint is a trace fossil. Burrows can also create impressions in soft rocks or mud, leaving a trace fossil.
Trace fossils don't record the shapes of shells or of creatures themselves, but record signs of activity such as tracks and burrows. The shape, size, and pattern of many trace fossils are very spicific and can be used just like fossil shells to study the sistory of animal life and correlate among rock layers. The study of animal traces is call ichnology.
Macrofossils vs Microfossils
Macrofossils can be several meters long and weigh several tons. Bones, shells, feathers, and leaves can all become macrofossils, as well as petrified trees or dinosaur bones.
Microfossils are only visible with a microscope. Bacteria and pollen are examples of microfossils.
Preserved remains become fossils if they reach an age of about 10,000 years. Fossils can come from the Archaeaean Eon (which began almost 4 billion years ago) all the way up to the Holocene Epoch (which continues today). The fossilized teeth of wooly mammoths are some of our most "recent" fossils. Some of the oldest fossils are those of ancient algae that lived in the ocean more than 3 billion years ago.
Broadly speaking, Bell Island’s fossils can be divided into three main communities:
- microbial mats
- simple shallow-burrowers
- complex deepburrowers
These assemblages may occur alone in a bedding plane or together, particularly in the case of the microbial mats and the shallow-burrowers.
The matgrounds are preserved either as wrinkle structures or as elephant skin fabrics. The two textures can be seen on the same bedding plane and can blend laterally into one another, indicating that they form part of the same matground community. These matgrounds may be crisscrossed by simple surface trails (trace fossils) that rarely penetrate deeper than a few mm into the sediment.
The simple, shallow-burrowing fossils are mostly made up of horizontally oriented burrows, which reach a maximum depth of 20 mm. More complex burrows are also present in these assemblages, albeit much rarer. These include U-shaped burrows, and larger, horizontally oriented, branching burrow networks. While the shallow-tier community can occur on its own on a bedding plane, it is more commonly found concentrated around the edge of, or directly beneath, the microbial mats. When in proximity to a matground, these shallow-tier communities form intense bioturbation zones—areas with a high burrow density.
Deeper-tier trace fossils are usually limited to layers well above the sandstones that preserve microbial textures (wrinkle structures and elephant skin fabrics). These deeper-tier communities include simple, horizontally oriented burrows similar to those seen in the shallow-burrowing assemblage, however they also include vertically oriented burrows produced by organisms capable of deep burrowing and producing more complex burrow morphologies. These vertical burrows include simple non-branching forms and complex branching burrows produced by methodological sediment removal.