Diagenesis Pronunciation

Fun Facts

• ✓Diagenesis can take anywhere from a few thousand to hundreds of millions of years to fully transform sediment into solid rock, depending on temperature, pressure, and the chemistry of the surrounding water.
• ✓The process of permineralization, which is how most dinosaur bones become fossils, is a specific type of diagenesis in which mineral-rich groundwater slowly fills microscopic pores in buried bone with crystals of calcite, silica, or iron compounds.
• ✓Scientists use a technique called cathodoluminescence, which bombards thin rock slices with electrons and measures the glow produced, to detect diagenetic alteration in fossil bones and figure out which chemical signals from the original animal are still trustworthy.
• ✓Amber, the fossilized resin that famously preserved insects and even dinosaur feathers in astonishing detail, undergoes its own diagenetic transformation called polymerization, in which liquid tree resin crosslinks into a hard, stable polymer over tens of millions of years.
• ✓Researchers studying a 75-million-year-old Brachylophosaurus named Leonardo found that diagenesis had been so gentle in that particular mudstone environment that skin impressions, soft tissue outlines, and even traces of stomach contents were preserved alongside the bones.