Palentologo course

The palentologist is the one who works in the field of palentology, a branch of science that studies life in the past coined in the first half of the nineteenth century which literally means "discourse on ancient organisms". The documents that allow us to reconstruct the life patterns of the past are the fossils that have come down to us through the processes of fossilization. The fossil is any remnant of an animal or plant that lived in epochs prior to the present one, or of any trace that an organism has left in the rock layers, including those of its activity such as footprints, footprints, travel tracks, and so on. . Fossils are found inside the rocks that make up the most superficial portion of the earth's crust, organisms fossilized in different ways, but in any case lived in periods of time prior to the time in which we live. Fossils, as remains of ancient organisms, are precious witnesses of the Earth's past, scientific objects that allow us to reach, through their study, the reconstruction of biological, geological and geographical events. Their geochronological significance is very important: they have in fact made it possible to know the evolutionary history of the Earth. A particular and significant interest is represented by the "guide fossils" which had a short life but a wide geographical distribution; their discovery in layers of rocks often located even at a great distance from each other, has made it possible to attribute the same age to these rocks. The process of fossilization of an organic remnant begins immediately after death. From the study of fossil associations it can be deduced whether the fossilization environment was the same as that of life (native fossil) or not (allochthonous fossil). The phenomenon of transport is naturally more likely to have occurred on free-moving organisms (marine organisms, birds) than on those attached to the substrate (for example corals).