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[Dino and Coop singing]

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Today's video is a little bit dark and a tiny bit gross, so before we begin: [Gross warning sign]

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Puppies!

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Rainbows!

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Fields of flowers!

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Beyoncé! [Pictures of nice things]

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Puppies running with Beyoncé through a field of flowers under a rainbow.

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How pleasant.

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Now onto the not so pleasant stuff:

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How living things become fossils. [Gravestone for puppies and rainbows]

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They die.

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…What? We told you it was a little dark.

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And we're only just getting started. [Guy crying in the rain]

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So, when an animal dies, the first things to go are its flesh and organs, which rot [Coop pointing at a blackboard]

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away rather quickly.

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We don't need to show that bit.

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And sorry to those of you with overactive imaginations… [Students look grossed out]

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keep focusing on Beyoncé and puppies. [Student collapses]

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But!

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We will show you what remains once the icky process is over and done with: the skull and bones. [Animal skeleton]

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See, these are made of calcium and collagen, which don't decompose nearly as easily as

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everything else.

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The bones end up underground.

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Because despite the fact that humans are the only creature on earth to hold formal burial [Human skeleton put into a grave]

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ceremonies, all bones, human or other, still tend to get covered by mud and sediment over

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time, before eventually getting buried deep into the rocky earth below. [Dirt covers the skeleton]

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And then comes something pretty neat – a chemical process that actually ends up turning

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the bones into a rock that resembles the rocky earth that surrounds it. [Skeleton turns into the rock]

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Sounds straight out of Harry Potter, right?

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Bones turned into stone?

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Of course, what this means is that at first glance, well, technically there's no skeleton left.

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Just rock.

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But then comes an earthquake or some other natural shift that causes the rock below the

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surface to wear down, crumble, and break. [Rock cracking]

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And if fossil hunters are lucky, the rock will break in such a way to expose the fossil within. [Guy finds a fossil]

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So when they dig it up – voila, we can see the fossil within the rock.

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Fossil hunters know where to look for fossils by examining landforms and rock types, because

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most fossils tend to be found in sedimentary rock. [Dino pointing at a blackboard]

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Though that's not the only place we can find fossils.

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Amber, resin, and even ice can contain fossils.

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Amber is special in that we can often find tiny delicate creatures like prehistoric bugs! [Bug fossil shown preserved in amber]

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Never a prehistoric cockroach though…those things can survive anything. [Cockroach walking away from lasers and explosions]

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And you're all probably familiar with the extremely well-preserved wooly mammoths we've

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found frozen in ice.

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If anything remains untouched for millions and millions of years, there's a chance there's

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something old for us to find inside. [Caveman frozen in a block of ice]

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Hey, maybe that means you could even find a fossil underneath your bed!

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By the way, you know when Mom says “clean your room” she doesn't actually mean, “cram [All the boy's stuff is shoved under his bed]

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everything under your bed,” right?

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