Marine biologists have scoured sea floor sediments for decades, finding living creatures in the mud but never fossils in the process of forming. That's because when a sea creature dies, its carcass is totally recycled within weeks. So, if a creature's soft parts are going to fossilize, it has to happen extremely fast.

The area surrounding what is now Wuda, Inner Mongolia, once teemed with tropical plants before a tremendous ancient volcanic explosion overwhelmed it. The ash-entombed forest, buried between coal layers, left such remarkably preserved fossilized plants that artists and paleontologists have been able to reconstruct the former wet-forest landscape.

Salamanders are slick-skinned amphibians whose diets shift as they mature. Some live their entire lives in water, and others spend their adult lives on land. Those inhabiting water eat plankton when young and then various insects and other small arthropods called "clam shrimp" when older.

Nature, one of the premier science journals in the world today, recently published its editors' choice of science stories for 2011.¹

Howell Thomas, senior paleontological preparator for the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, was skeptical when a woman claimed that she found a fossilized whale brain in San Luis Obispo County, California, nine years ago.