But if we don't look after nature, nature can't look after us. We must act on scientific evidence, we must act together, and we must act now. For many, the Natural History Museum is a place that inspires learning, gives purpose and provides hope.
People tell us they 'still get shivers walking through the front door', and thank us for inspiring the next generation of scientists. To reverse the damage we've done and protect the future, we need the knowledge that comes from scientific discovery. Understanding and protecting life on our planet is the greatest scientific challenge of our age.
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Thank you. Find out what Museum scientists are revealing about how dinosaurs looked, lived and behaved. Dr Susie Maidment shares what it's like to be a dinosaur researcher, how she got into this career and advice for budding palaeontologists.
Discover fascinating fossils you can find around Britain, what they look like and where to search. Fossil poo may not be a glamorous fossil find, but it can reveal a lot about prehistoric animals.
Get email updates about our news, science, exhibitions, events, products, services and fundraising activities. You must be over the age of Privacy notice. Smart cookie preferences. Change cookie preferences Accept all cookies. Skip to content. Read later. You don't have any saved articles. By Lisa Hendry. What is a fossil? Fossilised dinosaur poo is an example of a trace fossil. Does everything fossilise? Most things that die rot away completely, leaving nothing behind. How do fossils form?
These are the key steps: 1. The animal dies. The soft parts of organisms do not form fossils well. This means there is little information about what these organisms looked like. Any traces of fossils that there may have been were likely destroyed by geological activity. This is why scientists cannot be certain about how life began. They do not have enough evidence. Fossils of the simplest organisms are found in the oldest rocks, and fossils of more complex organisms in the newest rocks.
This supports Darwin's theory of evolution , which states that simple life forms gradually evolved into more complex ones. Evidence for early forms of life comes from fossils. By studying fossils, scientists can learn how much or how little organisms have changed as life developed on Earth. There are gaps in the fossil record because many early forms of life were soft-bodied, which means that they have left few traces behind.
Also some rocks are commercially important and are excavated to be sold and may reveal fossils that palaeontologists could not normally afford to dig for, or simply process material in such huge volumes that something is bound to turn up. In short, a group or species that was represented by huge numbers of individuals that lived for a long time, died out only recently, and hung around in deserts or near water, and was quite large and had lots of hard parts, we're likely to know well.
A small, soft bodied animal from the deep ocean or middle of a rainforest and was alive only very briefly many hundreds of millions of years ago, we may never know about.
In short, we have a great record of fossil deer, we have almost no fossil flatworms. Understanding these is obviously important for palaeontology. It would be too easy to look at the wealth of dinosaur fossils coming from what were deserts and conclude that these teemed with life when the truth is simply that they preserved many more skeletons than the forests.
While the fossil record is really pretty good surrounding the origins of birds, a great many specimens come from very few locations as we are reliant on the fossil-bearing rocks with the quality of preservation to retain the details of the fragile bones of small dinosaurs and early birds. It should not be a surprise then that there are also gaps in our knowledge precisely because so few areas preserve this kind of material in large numbers.
Still, recognising such issues is that first step in dealing with them and while clearly there is only so much that can be done, there are for example methods available to counter the effects of a limited amount of rocks to dig in on studies of the evolution of fossil groups.
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