How to fossilize...yourself - Phoebe A. Cohen

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You can aspire to great things in life, but how about in death? Could you be one of the world's greatest fossils many years from now? To ensure being found by a future paleontologist, you'll need to die in a highly specific way (think within tree sap or on the bottom of the ocean floor), and nature takes care of the rest. Phoebe A. Cohen details the steps your body must take to find future fame as a fossil.

Lesson by Phoebe A. Cohen, animation by Anton Bogaty.

Imagine being a fossil:

touring the world's great museums,

inspiring awe in onlookers of all ages,

posing for hordes of fawning photographers.

Sound like something you'd like?

Well, good luck!

At least 99.9% of creatures that have ever lived

aren't preserved in the fossil record.

But forget about them,

everyone else will,

and listen up!

If you want your corpse

in the exclusive 0.01% Club,

the Hall of Preserved Fossil Fame,

it will not be easy.

You better work!

Step one: die.

It's a cold, hard fact of fossilization.

Everything paleontologists find

was once alive and, at some point, died.

We'll skip the details

and assume you had a long, fulfilling life

so we can get to what is really important --

how you die.

There are many ways to become a fossil,

so let's highlight your top death options.

You could get yourself trapped in tree sap,

which, when hardens, turns into amber

and can survive intact for millions of years.

But unless you find a really big tree to sit under,

amber preservation will likely remain

the domain of insects and other very small animals.

Generally, the right place to be

if you want to end up a fossil

is wherever sediment is actively being deposited,

like a lake or an ocean floor.

A mountaintop or prairie?

Not good!

You need to get buried,

the faster the better,

because the longer you hang around on the surface,

the more likely you'll get eaten,

scavenged,

or otherwise destroyed

before ever having a chance to get preserved.

If you can get buried someplace

with little to no oxygen,

like a bog or a deep lake bottom,

even better.

That lack of oxygen will slow down your decay

and give you more time to fossilize.

So, let's say you're lucky enough to die

and get buried in a shallow sea

under muddy, sandy sediments.

What's your next move?

One option is a process

called permineralization.

While all your soft parts decay away,

your bones get saturated with mineral-rich waters.

Bit by bit, microscopic crystals precipitate

out of these waters

to fill in the empty spaces and pores in your bones.

Otherwise, you'd better hope

the sediments around you harden

while your bones decay away

and another sediment or mineral fills in the spaces

your bones leave behind,

creating a perfect cast of your skeleton.

Over time, the sediments around your fossil

will lithify or turn into rock.

But you're not in the clear yet!

Many things could happen

to those sedimentary rocks

that might destroy your chances

of getting discovered.

They could get uplifted into a mountain range

and eroded away

or carried along in an oceanic plate

and subducted back into the Earth's mantle,

melting your fossil into hot mush.

Fingers crossed your rock surroundings

will get gently lifted up

by plate tectonics,

sea levels will change,

and you'll end up under dry land

close to the surface,

but not so close

that erosion from wind and rain wipes you away

before someone can come find you.

The last step in this long process,

an intrepid paleontologist has to come find you.

Maybe she's a research scientist

scouting for fossils your age and type

or just an amateur collector

hoping for a fortuitous find.

She whacks away at layers of rock above you

or spots your fossil exposed

in a creek bank after a flood.

And there you are,

a magnificent scientific discovery,

millions of years in the making!

She and her colleagues gently extract you

from the surrounding sediment,

measure and photograph

all the bits and pieces they find,

and begin the complex task of reconstructing

how and when you lived

based on the evidence they find in your bones.

Paleontologists will be some of your biggest fans

along with all those admiring crowds at the museum.

You made it!

You spent years underground in obscurity,

shedding blood,

sweat,

tears,

and your internal organs.

You worked yourself to the bone

until your bones disintegrated

and were replaced by minerals and sediments.

But it was all worth it

because you're a famous fossil!

Now, you better hold that pose!