What is "fossilize"

Usage examples of "fossilize".

In fact it was a fossilized ammonite, three hundred million years old.

It reminded me of a sepia painting I had once seen done from the ink of a fossil Belemnite that must have perished and become fossilized millions of years ago.

In some places, fossilized trunks, lying on the ground, betokened the existence of one of the coal districts that are common upon the continent of Africa.

According to Moir, the triangular pieces of fossilized whale bone discovered in the strata below the Coralline Crag might have once been used as spear points.

A dozen books stolen from the library lay open, and handfuls and jarfuls and heaps of materials were scattered about: quicksilver, henbane, brimstone, lead, creeping thyme, chalk, a fish fossilized in a slate, an egg, an acorn, sand, a bottle of rare air.

The largest of these animals included an armor-plated giant ten feet long and three wide, whose only remaining legacy is a set of fossilized footprints in the Karoo, South Africa.

Anything would do - she needed a time-out from staring at the buildings without comprehension, and from trying to figure out whether the fossilized forms and microforms they contained held any more suggestion than the elusive touch of lives long gone.

The leafless maples and birches did not exactly resemble trees but might have been the fossilized skeletons of an ancient prehuman race.

But she seemed to respect its privacy, so it became like a treehouse, a repository for all manner of boy debris: fossilized cowpies, rodent skulls, comic books, homemade weapons, rusted horseshoes, and probably, long after my last ascent, racy magazines.

It touched down at Deuteronilus Mensae in 2017 and successfully completed all of its objectives, including locating and identifying formations that resembled fossilized stromatolites, but when the landing party attempted to return to orbit, the motor of the ascent stage flamed out a few seconds after liftoff.

And he goes on to show us how the fossil evidence, hundreds of millions of years old, of these strange trilobite eyes that were stony even before they fossilized, gives us clues into the workings of their nervous systems and even into their varying ways of life in the oceans of remotest antiquity.

We have touched already on the unlikelihood of any set of bones becoming fossilized, but the record is actually worse than you might think.

His earliest remains have come, so far, from much the same African latitude: a fossilized skull and some other fragments from a Middle Stone Age site near Khartoum in the Sudan, and another skull and some bones from beneath thick clay at Asselar, some two hundred miles northeast of Timbuktu in the western Sudan.

Morlan concluded that many bones and antlers exhibited signs of intentional human work executed before the bones had become fossilized.

Whitney, in his original description of the fossil, observed that the Calaveras skull was highly fossilized.