I have just seen a video of a crab encased in rock, which has become a fossil.
How has that happened in such that solid rock forms around a creature, leaving a permanent imprint in stone?
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Well the creature dies and is covered in soft sediment. That gets covered in more and more soil until the pressure inside is so high that everything gets compressed.
Then the next step is the actual petrification, mineral rich water seeps through the fossil and replaces biological molecules with minerals, creating a rock in exactly the same shape of the dead animal
The conditions for that are very specific, so only a tiny fraction of dead animals will ever become fossils.
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