Look under the sea at Australia's Great Barrier Reef! This is one place where organic sedimentary rocks are being made.
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Courtesy of Abi Howe, American Geological Institute
Some Sedimentary Rocks Are Made of Fossils!
Rocks made of fossils are called organic sedimentary rocks.
This picture shows one place where organic rocks are being made on the Earth today. This is a coral reef where the skeletons of coral, clams, fish, and algae are being bound together to make a rock called limestone.
Some organic rocks are made of plants! They form when plant that have died are squashed deep underground for millions of years. The rock that they make is called coal. Coal doesn’t look like it is made of sediment. It is also often difficult to see the plant fossils within it because they have become so packed together.
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TES XXVI, 3 fall 2010
The
Fall 2010 issue of The Earth Scientist, focuses on rocks and minerals, including articles on minerals and mining, the use of minerals in society, and rare earth minerals, and includes 3 posters!
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Fossils are evidence of what life was like long ago. The oldest fossils are over three billion years old and the youngest fossils are about 10,000 years old. Scientists that study fossils know that creatures
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Kingdom Plantae has almost 300,000 different kinds of plants. Plants are found all over planet Earth. They can live in fields, in swamps, in oceans and in the desert. They can live where it is hot and
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Spotting minerals is fun! There are many different types of minerals. Each has a different name and special traits. You can learn more about minerals by looking closely at them to understand their special
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This mineral is called quartz! Sometimes it looks white like milk but usually it looks clear like glass, sometimes with a little pink or gray tinge of color. You can find crystals of quartz in many different
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Mica minerals make some rocks sparkle! Look for them in your igneous and metamorphic rocks. Do they make your rocks sparkle? They break into flat plates because they have cleavage.
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This is a feldspar mineral! Look for it in igneous rocks where it looks like white or pink crystals. You might find it in other types of rocks as well.
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The mineral that is green is called olivine! Look for it in igneous and metamorphic rocks. In this picture, olivine is filling a hole in the igneous rock.
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