concept

Taphonomy

The study of everything that happens to a body between death and discovery - decay, scavenging, hydraulic sorting, burial, and the chemical changes that follow inside rock. The Soviet paleontologist Ivan Efremov named it in 1940, and his central insight is the part worth keeping: the accidents standing between a scientist and the evidence are not noise, they *are* the evidence. Learn their rules and the gaps in a fossil record become as informative as the fossils.