Tag Archives: DINOSAURS

How Do Fossils Form?

Contrary to popular belief, becoming a fossil can be easy instead of hard, and fossils can be abundant instead of rare. It all depends on what an organism is made of, where it lives and dies, and what happens next in the dust-to-dust process—preservation or natural recycling. Continue reading How Do Fossils Form?

How Does Earth’s Carbon Cycle Work?

Hundreds of millions of years ago, massive ice caps sheathed Earth’s continents from coast to coast. Only the peaks of the planet’s mountains stood above the ice as glaciers ground and crushed their way through the bedrock, meandering slowly toward the snow-covered plains. Where the glaciers met the oceans, huge blocks of ice and rock calved from the glaciers and dropped into the sea. Life, mostly algae, cyanobacteria and other bacteria, somehow persisted in the small ice-free pockets of ocean water. Like an icy planet in a distant solar system, Earth during its formative years, a juvenile phase known as the “Snowball” Earth, was a far different place than the mostly blue planet of today. Continue reading How Does Earth’s Carbon Cycle Work?