You may see in the galleries of the Museum up
stairs specimens of limestones in which such fossil remains of existing
animals are imbedded. There are some specimens in which turtles' eggs
have been imbedded in calcareous sand, and before the sun had hatched
the young turtles, they became covered over with calcareous mud, and
thus have been preserved and fossilized.
Not only does this process of imbedding and fossilization occur with
marine and other aquatic animals and plants, but it affects those land
animals and plants which are drifted away to sea, or become buried in
bogs or morasses; and the animals which have been trodden down by their
fellows and crushed in the mud at the river's bank, as the herd have
come to drink. In any of these cases, the organisms may be crushed or
be mutilated, before or after putrefaction, in such a manner that
perhaps only a part will be left in the form in which it reaches us. It
is, indeed, a most remarkable fact, that it is quite an exceptional
case to find a skeleton of any one of all the thousands of wild land
animals that we know are constantly being killed, or dying in the
course of nature: they are preyed on and devoured by other animals or
die in places where their bodies are not afterwards protected by mud.
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