thumb|300px|Examples of animal fossils. Clockwise from top left: Onychocrinus, [[Palaeosinopa, Gryphaea, and Harpactocarcinus]]
A fossil is the preserved remains or traces of an ancient organism, such as bones, shells, or imprints left in rock. Fossils matter because they provide evidence of past life on Earth and help scientists understand how organisms and environments have changed over time.
AI-generated from the Wikipedia summary — may contain errors.
thumb|300px|Examples of animal fossils. Clockwise from top left: Onychocrinus, [[Palaeosinopa, Gryphaea, and Harpactocarcinus]]
A fossil (from Classical Latin , ) is any preserved remains, impression, or trace of any once-living thing from a past geological age. Examples include bones, shells, exoskeletons, stone imprints of animals or microbes, objects preserved in amber, hair, petrified wood and DNA remnants. The totality of fossils is known as the fossil record. Though the fossil record is incomplete, numerous studies have demonstrated that there is enough information available to give a good understanding of the pattern of diversification of life on Earth. In addition, the record can predict and fill gaps such as the discovery of Tiktaalik in the arctic of Canada.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).