Hello, fans! As many of you know, I've been extremely busy - not only have I been working in the herpetology lab, but also I've been out in Montana digging up a T. rex, and have been spending time in the vertebrate paleontology lab helping to prepare the fossils that we brought back from the Montana site. However, I figured I'd talk about a rather important aspect of paleontology - namely, taphonomy!
First things first - do NOT confuse TAPHONOMY with TAXONOMY! The two are similar in sound, but VERY different in meaning. Taphonomy is basically the study of what happens between the time an organism dies, and the time it is discovered by the paleontologist. Taphonomy is extremely important because taphonomic factors may have large impacts on results.
Taphonomy involves many different subfields. One such example is Biostratinomy. This specifically involves the changes that occur between the time of death, and the time at which the organism in question is actually buried. There are several different types of changes that may take place, including the following:
Physical: transport (ie body flows down a river), breakage (ie the remains are broken apart), or exhumation (being unearthed prior to fossilization)
Chemical: Things such as oxidation and early changes in minerology, depending on the environment in which the organism is deposited
Biological: Things such as decay, scavenging, reworking of the burial site by burrowing organisms or roots, or boring directly into the bones themselves by certain species of animal/plant
These factors have important effects on the results and interpretations of studies. For example, if you find remains of a dinosaur, that does not mean the animal was specifically living right around where you found it. It may have died miles away, and was simply transported to where you happened to find it. There are ways to determine whether or not a specimen was transported very far before its burial, but that is a subject for another time.
Another subset of taphonomy is the process of diagenesis - this is the study of changes that occur between burial and fossilization (or destruction). This has important implications in paleontology, as the actual shape and features on the fossil itself may not be the same as the original bone - they may be due to things such as crushing, or other factors that come into play during this process. There are ways to test for such biases, but I will not get into them here.
To sum up, taphonomy is an extremely important topic to understand in Paleontology, as taphonomic factors can be significant biases that influence what we see in the fossil record. I hope you enjoyed today's Sci-Day!
