Taphonomy and Fossilization
Taphonomy studies what happens to organisms between death and discovery, explaining how fossils form and how preservation shapes the fossil record.
Definition
Taphonomy is the study of the processes affecting organic remains from death through fossilization and recovery; fossilization is the set of physical and chemical processes that preserve those remains in the rock record.
Scope
This area covers the processes of death, decay, transport, burial, and diagenesis that turn organisms into fossils, the exceptional deposits that preserve soft tissues, the study of trace fossils, and the biases that preservation imposes on our reading of the fossil record.
Sub-topics
Core questions
- What happens to an organism between death and fossilization?
- Which conditions favor preservation of hard and soft parts?
- How do taphonomic processes bias the fossil record?
- How can taphonomic information itself be used as data?
Key concepts
- Biostratinomy and diagenesis
- Decay and disarticulation
- Time averaging
- Preservation bias and megabias
Key theories
- Information loss and gain in taphonomy
- Taphonomic processes both destroy and add information, so understanding decay, transport, and burial is essential to interpret fossil assemblages correctly.
- Megabias and secular change in preservation
- The quality and style of preservation have changed through geological time, producing long-term biases that must be accounted for in diversity studies.
Clinical relevance
Taphonomy is essential to correctly reading the fossil record, separating biological signal from preservational artifact in studies of diversity, ecology, and extinction, and it informs forensic and archaeological interpretation of buried remains.
History
The term taphonomy was coined by Ivan Efremov in 1940. The field matured through actualistic studies of modern death assemblages and vertebrate taphonomy in the late twentieth century, establishing preservation as a subject of quantitative study rather than a nuisance.
Debates
- Severity of taphonomic bias in diversity studies
- How strongly preservation and sampling distort apparent patterns of past diversity, and how to correct for them, is widely debated.
Key figures
- Ivan Efremov
- Anna K. Behrensmeyer
- Susan M. Kidwell
Related topics
Seminal works
- behrensmeyer1985
- allison2011
Frequently asked questions
- What is taphonomy?
- Taphonomy is the study of everything that happens to an organism's remains after death, including decay, burial, and fossilization, and how this shapes the fossil record.
- Why does taphonomy matter?
- Because preservation is selective, understanding taphonomy lets paleontologists tell which patterns in the fossil record are real biology and which are artifacts.