Is a really old living organism a fossil?
Is a really old living organism a fossil? A specimen must be about 10,000 years old to be considered a fossil and many of them on the fossil record are millions of years old. The oldest fossils are over 3.5 billion years old, which may mean that life emerged relatively early in the Earth's history (Earth is 4.543 billion years old). How do fossils explain the past? Fossils give us information about how animals and plants lived in the past. By studying the fossil record we can tell how long life has existed on Earth, and how different plants and...