People often think of fossils as being mineralized bones or shells stored in museums. However, they can even be any remains or traces of ancient organisms. They can ever be footprints, burrows, or casts of bodies, with nothing else surviving. Interpreting fossils is sometimes like solving a jigsaw puzzle.One of the ways of interpreting a fossil to compare the fossil with the skeleton of a living creature that seems to resemble it. For example, there are many well preserved fossils of coiled shell of ammonites, which are an extinct group of marine animals with no backbone. However, the soft body parts of these animals have not been preserved. But the fossils can be reconstructed, because a modern marine species known as the nautilus is very similar to the ammonites. So, in this case, interpretation is possible. When only one or two skeletons of a species have been discovered, there is no way of interpreting them correctly. For example, in the case of a dinosaur fossil, what was once interpreted as being a horn is now believed to be a large pointed thumb? So, until many similar specimens have been found, it is unwise to attempt a species description
