Using an Experiment in Burial Taphonomy to Delve into the Fossil Record

To gain better insights into taphonomic processes and the conditions generally associated with becoming part of the paleontologic record, students in my first-year seminar on mass extinctions, after procuring readily available materials at a local supermarket, buried and six weeks later exhumed a wide range of organisms that had recently expired. Based on their knowledge of common fossils studied in a previous exercise and on our field-based burial experiment, students formulated and tested hypotheses about the preservational potential of different organisms and gained experience with scientific methodology involving data collection, analysis, and synthesis. This experiment successfully mimicked the very early stages in the preservation process and enabled introductory students to make reasonable predictions that they could test about the kinds of organisms that are most likely to become preserved as fossils, the conditions that are conducive for entry into the geologic record, and the rarity of fossilization.