How fossils were formed?

This was a marine creature that lived on the sea bottom where it crawled along in search of food. At a certain point in time a part of the sea where it lived suddenly became laden with a huge mass of soil brought by rivers in flood. This muddy deposit buried millions of trilobites and for tens of millions of years the muddy deposits continued to build upon the ocean floor until they became huge underwater mountains.

The enormous weight of the mud caused the mountain to become as hard as rock. Then great earth movements split the mountain apart to reveal the various layers of rock.

All this time the trilobite lay caught in the rock, its own body turned to stone. Then ice, wind and rain made the valley with the fossil of a trilobite inside it.

This is how the remains of these animals that once lived in the sea can be found now, many millions of years late, many kilometres in land.

 

Picture Credit : Google