WE ARE ALL yOUNG eARTHER NOW:

You'll need an organism--preferably one with hard bones or a shell. Add fine-grained sediment and rapid burial and in 10,000 years or so, you'll be well on your way to a deliciously durable fossil.

It's a cooking project that can only take place in Earth's test kitchen, and the baking time is admittedly long. But what if there were a quicker way--think microwave instead of slow cooker? A group of paleontologists think they've discovered a way that upends tradition and could give others in the field new insights into the way things fossilize. They published a paper on their method today in the journal Paleontology. [...]

For the less patient, there's a new option: "bake" fossils by packing the work of tens of thousands of years into a 24-hour period.

Field Museum researcher Evan Saitta and his colleagues call their method "sediment-encased maturation," and it involves pressing samples into clay tablets which are then baked in an oven at 3500 psi--about the pressure of a professional-grade power washer, and roughly equivalent to the pressure of rock in the shallow parts of Earth's crust, where fossils are found. The result looks and acts like a real-life fossil. They tested the method on feathers, lizards, and leaves.

Tweet   @brothersjudd