Paleontological site

Sima del Elefante, one of the Atapuerca sites, Spain.
Fossil of a pterosaur (Ctenochasma) from the Solnhofen Limestone, Germany (American Museum of Natural History, New York, US).

A paleontological or fossiliferous site is a locality in which a significant quantity of fossils is naturally preserved in the rocks. The extent of the site is determined, in some cases, by the spatial distribution of the concentration of fossils and in others by practical issues of sampling or excavation. The discipline that studies the formation of fossil sites is the part of paleontology called taphonomy.[1]

The term paleontological site is somewhat ambiguous and its use is more practical than scientific, so it can refer to localities in which several fossiliferous layers of different ages appear, whose study must be faced by clearly separating each layer (strictly speaking, each layer would be a different site).

The term fossil-lagerstätte (from the German Fossillagerstätte, "fossil site") is often used for some sites with a special quality of fossils or with a high number of remains.[1]

  1. ^ a b Fernández López, S. R. (2000). Temas de Tafonomía (PDF) (in Spanish). Departamento de Paleontología, Universidad Complutense de Madrid.