fossil record

At INA, scientists connect living coccolithophores to their fossil record, using their microscopic plates to date rocks and trace Earth's climate history.

A living fossil is a term for a species that was once known only from its fossil record and was later discovered in living form, apparently preserving the physical features from long-gone ancestors.

There is no fossil record of sentient AI, no ice cores of machine feeling, so to speak.

"It is a single community of a single species of animal from a snapshot in time, and it's a huge sample size. That almost never happens in the fossil record," says Prof Bamforth.

We know from the fossil record that dire wolves were social creatures, but we’re too late to observe exactly how each generation of pups learned skills from the one before it.