Video Transcript
The pictures show three types of fossils: nummulites, ferns, and coral. Which type of fossil would you expect to see in an area that was hot and rainy?
A paleoenvironment is the environment during a particular geological time. And we can learn more about these different environments of the past by looking at
fossils from that era. By applying what we know about these organisms that live today to prehistoric times,
we can estimate what the environment must have been like then. For instance, nummulites are a group of single-celled organisms that live in the
sea.
As we can now find their fossils in the rocks of some mountains, this tells us that
those mountains used to be underwater and likely rose out of the water over time
taking these fossils with them. Coral also forms fossils. And when we find these coral fossils, we know that the area they were found in used
to be warm, clear, and shallow seas. If we found a fossil of a fern, we could estimate that the fern’s environment at that
time was a hot and rainy tropical environment. We can say this because that’s the environment in which we find ferns today.
Now we know the correct answer to this question. The type of fossil we would expect to see in an area that was hot and rainy would be
the fossils of ferns.
