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Synonyms

fossil record

Cultural  

  1. A term used by paleontologists (see paleontology) to refer to the total number of fossils that have been discovered, as well as to the information derived from them. (See evolution of Earth.)

Example Sentences

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These discoveries extend the fossil record of this group back into the Ediacaran Period for the first time.

From Science Daily • Apr. 6, 2026

Progress has been slow because their fossil record is limited and their genomes are complex.

From Science Daily • Apr. 1, 2026

However, the fossil record does not preserve the entire lifespan of an individual animal.

From Science Daily • Mar. 5, 2026

Within a few hundred thousand years of this dramatic increase, the earliest known microfossils of eukaryotes appear in the fossil record.

From Science Daily • Feb. 20, 2026

The fossil record speaks to us unambiguously of creatures that once were present in enormous numbers and that have now vanished utterly.'

From "Cosmos" by Carl Sagan

Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023

Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.