Museo di Paleontologia                  

               Comune di Bova (Reggio Calabria) ITALIA 

Paleontology Museum Comune of Bova (Reggio Calabria) Italy

Fossils and Fossilization 

The term fossil descends from latin “faveo” = excavation, and the etymology points out that this type of findings, preserved jealously underground, has discovered after an activity of excavation or else a natural erosive process that brings to light what kept in depth.

At first the meaning was related to organic remains of animals and plants, silent testimonies of passed life; today the term also includes signs impressed into the land by moving forward majestically of a dinosaur or by walking of man and, only recently, the term also denotes the traces of activity of inanimate world, as rain drops on the land, thin laminations or ripples traced on the sand by a water flow (ripple marks), and so on.

Finally, today the word fossil denotes any indication brought to light, it isn’t important how it is, but it is useful for an environmental ambient reconstruction and for a full knowledge of past world. 

By analysing the palaeontologic documentation, it seems that Calabria and in particular Aspromonte, are land of election for this kind of researches.  

Without any doubt, our impressions are deformed by relative facility and abundance with which some fossil remains are discovered, but this mustn’t mislead ourselves. The singular phenomenon of fossilization has been possible thanks to some luck circumstances, happened in far-off time. 

In fact, this phenomenon occurs only through accurate and particular chemical -physic conditions that have been abled to preserve the organic remains with the burial, concealing them from rapid destruction due to decomposition agents. 

The experience shows that after the death the bodies are usually destroyed in short time by mechanical or chemical processes. The soft tissues decompose or are eated by animals that feed on carcasses, therefore only hard parts remain. But also these ones, as time goes away, scatters and are destroyed: this happens for the Vertebrates skeleton that consists of a great number of different and separate bones. 

What hell it should be if couldn’t be like this! We consider for an instant the huge number of living beings which have populated the planet during million of years. They were certainly billion and billion of organisms. If their mortal remains were not dissolved, changed and returned in elementary form, they would accumulate on the ground in so big piles that they can prevent the set up of any other subsequent living being.  

On the other hand, everyday we realize that it is necessary to make way for other living beings and new things. 

And the provident Nature provides this work of cleanliness ("...pulvis es et in pulverem reverteris"), removing and recycling ceaselessly the rubbish. However sometimes there is who is able to elude the strict paradigm of the life, by keeping features and countenance during the millenniums, as in the fossils, and to assure himself a sort of eternity.  

So, among the endless number of creatures which every year ceases living, it is possible to find spare remains only of an extremely little part. In order to avoid or at least to slow down the decomposition process, it is necessary that the remains are buried in some way. As much sooner the burial takes place after the death of the animal, as the probabilities of a fossilization are greater.  

But also the burial is not able to stop the decomposition completely, because the process continues through an anaerobic way destroying the soft tissues. Moreover the covering with earth doesn’t protect from the destruction either the hard parts which only for pure case are able to exceed unharmed very long time periods. 

Therefore it is evident that a conservation after the death is a very rare circumstance and in the major part of cases, only the teeth, the bones or the shell of a sea-shell, that are the hard parts of a skeleton, because of their same mineralogic composition, have the better chance to keep them in the time. Moreover, by examining a fossil and his context (the attitude, the stratigraphic position, the sedimentological analysis ad so on), it is possible to obtain important data for a reliable paleo-geographic and paleo-ambient reconstruction.