Florida Museum of Natural History
Key points
- Over the course of 20 years, an international team of scientists collected and carbon-dated more than 7,500 marine fossils from ocean beds around the world.
- Scientists used the dataset to determine which of several environmental factors contributes most to time averaging, a phenomenon in which organisms that lived in different time periods are mixed and preserved together in the same fossil bed.
- The results indicate that sedimentation is more important than other factors, such as the number of burrowing animals in a given area or the durability of fossils.
- The study, published in the journal PNAS, establishes guidelines regarding the types of research questions paleontologists can investigate using fossil samples.
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