ABSTRACT
Taphonomy considers two basic facts of paleontology. The first fact is that fossils (with rare exceptions such as insects in amber or animals smothered by volcanic ash or sandstorms) normally do not preserve the organism as it was precisely at the moment of death. Ancillary to this is the fact that fossil assemblages, likewise, are not (usually) the instantaneously preserved living communities. Animal fossils are just the remains of decomposed individuals, commonly the hardest parts, that become buried in sediments. In the case of vertebrates, we face the problem of discovering the meaning of piles of broken bones, in biological terms. To answer this question, and to reconstruct the paleoecology of these creatures with any confidence, we must assess the degree to which fossil assemblages constitute representative samples of the communities of animals from which they were derived.
