Theres a whole lot of videos where people pick up a rock and crack it to reveal a fossil… but how do they know to break that specific rock?
Do they just film themselves cracking rocks until they find one?
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Fossils tend to clump together in places where fossilization is more likely; the amount of dead creatures on earth so far outstrips the amount of fossils they leave behind strictly because the process of turning bone into stone is so finicky and rare. Most bones break down and are reincorporated into the food-web, either by being leeched into plants, or being directly consumed by animals.
Those remains which do fossilize do so in particular locations. Once we can determine that ‘this is an area where fossilization could occur’, we can painstakingly pick through that area looking for fossils, in the form they now take the form of a lump of carbon or other minerals that had leached into the form and shape of the bones or shells as they slowly broke down, leaving the minerals in the shape of the creature behind.
That said, the more a paleontologist knows about the strata (rock layers) of a site, the more they’re able to gauge whether there will be a fossil in a particular chunk of rock. Cracking rocks to reveal fossils has a lot of educated guesswork behind it, but typically happens when the scientist already knows that there are other fossils in the area, making opening this next one very likely to reveal the same.
Bear in mind also that many fossils are destroyed without being uncovered, by mining, by natural disaster, and even in the initial assays of the area. So for every time you see the dramatic cracking of rocks to see a trilobite’s shell inside of it, there’s probably a dozen rocks where they split something to reveal more rocks, and probably another dozen fossils destroyed without people realizing that they were ever there at all.
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