• Question: I know you study fossils and I would like to know, as I like fossils, how hard is it to find one? And where is the usual place to find them?

    Asked by ejrw to Leila on 12 Mar 2012. This question was also asked by balletshoes1998.
    • Photo: Leila Battison

      Leila Battison answered on 12 Mar 2012:

      Well, it all depends on what kind of fossils you are looking for, and how old they are or how big they are.

      If you are looking for fossils of invertebrate animals (ones without backbones, like snails or bivalves or ammonites) they can be very easy to find if you go to a place where the rocks are of the right age. This website: http://www.ukfossils.co.uk/ has a list of all the places you can go to look for fossils around the UK. Make your teacher or your parents take you!

      If you are looking for very large things (like dinosaurs), very small things (like bacteria, what I look for), or very old things (also what I look for), it can be pretty tricky because they are too small to see, or too rare.

      Dinosaurs are quite rare, even though they’re big, because they lived on land, and fossils don’t form very well on land. Other animals eat the flesh and break up the bones until there is nothing left to be turned into a fossil. You can only really find them in certain places, mostly in america – though we have found dinosaur footprints here in Oxford!

      Very old fossils are hard to find, because as time passes, the rocks that contain them will be destroyed, so we don’t have many rocks that are older than about 500 million years left on Earth. You have to go to very specific places and look very hard for those kinds of fossil.

      And small fossils are just hard because you can’t see them. You have to go and guess what rocks are likely to have them in, and then take them back to the lab and slice them up and look at them under the microscope – with your fingers crossed.

      I look at some of the smallest and oldest fossils on Earth, ans it’s about as hard as it gets. But fossils can really be found all over the place. Let me know what you want to find, and i’ll tell you where is best to go. But you need a bit of patience to find a really good one!

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