ABSTRACT
During the past 30 years paleontologists and zooarchaeologists have displayed a serious interest in taphonomy, a term originally coined and defined by Russian paleontologist I.A. Efremov (1940) as the study of the transition of organic remains from the biosphere into the lithosphere. Weigelt (1927; English translation, 1989) had previously proposed the term biostratinomy and defined it as the effects on organic remains that take place between the time of an organism’s death and the burial of its remains. Muller (1963) later proposed the term diagenesis to denote the effects on organic remains that take place between the time of their burial and their recovery by a paleontologist or zooarchaeologist. Taphonomy, therefore, concerns both the biostratinomic and diagenetic phases of what Efremov referred to as the science of the laws of embedding or burial.
