How do people find crab fossils in rocks or find rocks that have amazing crystal structures inside of them?
In: Geology
Trial and error. Plus only certain kinds of rocks are going to have certain kinds of things in them. Plus most of the places people go looking for a specific kind of fossil are known for dispensing that kind of fossil.
In the same way that lava rock will never have a fossil in it at all because the lava would have burned away the thing it was trying to fossilize, there are rules. Some of them are obvious like this lava one. Others you have to be way more knowledgeable than either you or I are to even guess at.
add to that the number of people who were simply willing to say what might I find if I smash this in half, and over the years you develop an Atlas of knowledge about the good and poor bets in rock smashing.
You break open a lot of rocks and look. You don’t see something interesting, almost all the time. Sometimes you see something good. You keep the good ones and don’t keep the rest.
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