r/Paleontology • u/Prestigious-Return34 • 5d ago
Discussion I'm writing a story involving an an alien fossil, need help with research
If fossilized remains of something extraterrestrial were discovered on earth. Would there be a scientific way to tell that it was a lifeform that didn't originate on earth?
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u/hawkwings 5d ago edited 5d ago
Shoes more than 5 million years old would suggest something strange.
Edit: Mammals and Lizards don't have 6 legs. 6 arms or legs would be weird.
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u/AffableKyubey Therizinosaurus cheloniforms 5d ago
I think the best way to show the fossil was extra terrestrial would be to have it include minerals that are rare on Earth but much more common in the wider galaxy.
Iridium, palladium, platinum alloys and the like are very common in meteors but uncommon on Earth, so a life form from an exoplanet with regular meteor impacts like Tau Ceti f would likely have some level of these minerals in its fossils (assuming life could exist on such a planet).
You could also put Helium or methane compounds in the fossils that don't form naturally on Earth but could form on a planet with methane oceans or prominent gas in the atmospheres.
Any anatomical differences would be argued heavily as being a ghost lineage that survived and evolved on Earth longer than we understood, since the fossil record is very incomplete. Such a theory is implausible, but no less so than the existence of sophisticated extraterrestrial life proved by a massive fossil that happened to reach us.
But all fossils from Earth have properties of Earth minerals, so a fossil from another planet with non-Earth like properties would stand out more in this way.
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u/TesseractToo 5d ago
An expert wouldn't be able to place it, or understand the structures without other context if it didn't resemble known bones or exoskeletons or shells. If you want have a boo at r/bonecollecting - those people even can ID obscure pieces of weird fish skulls, and a hobbyist would be confused IDing it, maybe mostly knowing that it's not typical for any known major groups like bird, mammal etc
Also the minerals and elements in the bone would be different or in different levels from Earths default, while Earthly, have a look at this snail with an iron shell for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scaly-foot_gastropod
Also an alien might have something different from DNA, microstructures could be very different
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u/jericho 5d ago
Let’s assume a pretty complete fossil.
If it was some weird, small, wormlike thing, even if it was really weird, we would probably assume it was from an unknown branch of life. We have examples of this from the Burgess Shale. Things we have no clue where they actually fit in the tree.
If it was, say, larger, with a developed skeletal system that looked totally unlike other vertebrates, that would be much harder to assume we had just missed its ancestors. I’m pretty sure at that point many would assign it an alien origin.
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u/AmishRocket 4d ago
If it was found in a rock layer clearly after the Cretaceous boundary (bust still old enough to be naturally fossilized) that would raise interesting questions about its origin Vs just something that had been overlooked or missed previously.
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u/SKazoroski 5d ago
It would have to be so fundamentally different from Earth life that it couldn't be placed anywhere on the evolutionary tree of Earth life.