Fossils (Earth Science Class) Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 250 words

Fossils (Earth Science Class) - Essay Example They are an important resource for identifying the types of species living during a particular era. Body fossils are the actual parts of the organisms and are rare to find as they can only be found in the places where the organisms actually lived. They provide very important information regarding the physical appearance of the organism but they are still ignorant to their lifestyle. Trace fossils include footprints, pathways and droppings. These offer an insight into the lifestyle of these organisms. The time durations in the study of fossils and rocks are huge; hence a geological time scale has been developed. The major subdivisions of the geological time scale are eons, eras, periods and epochs with eon indicating a span of hundreds of millions of years. Comparison between the features of different sedimentary rocks and the type of fossils present in it can be used to establish age relationships between different strata of Earth’s crust. This is known as correlation and is an important tool in the study of fossils and rocks (Lutgens, Tarbuck, &