Print

Print


we know what we mean when we say 'subfossil':  It's an organism or part of an organism that is not alive and not in the organism, but also not a fossil.  Since a fossil is an organism or part of an organism in a rock, we mean:
 
Subfossil (noun): Any object that is the remains of an organism, or a trace of an organism, that is unfossilised.  The object is not rock and is not preserved in rock.
 
If you search for 'subfossil' in Google Scholar you get 11,000+ instances of the term used in this way, meaning stuff as small as pollen to stuff as big as the trees that made the pollen.  There are sub-fossil marine molluscs (which made me happy, since that is what I thought I was studying), sub-fossil diatoms, subfossil ostracods, subfossil prosimians (especially from Madagascar for some reason), subfossil birds and even sub-fossil tracks.  J G Evans, famous for land-snails in archaeology, explicitly used the term sub-fossil for his terrestrial snails.
 
However, I also could not find any formal definition of sub-fossil in a quick search of the palaeontological or geological literature.  This is probably simply because they deal with rocks and fossils, so if it' subfossil it's 'not fossil', and therefore simply 'not their department'.  I had hoped that sub-fossil, not being a palaeontological term, must be a term in common use amongst Holocene palaeoecologists.  However, Berglund's (ed.) Handbook of Holocene Palaeoecology and Palaeohydrology 1990 ('The Big Orange Book') speaks only of organisms, and their remains in sediments as either macrofossils or microfossils.  Also, Lyman's Vertebrate Taphonomy (Cambridge Manual in Archaeology 1994) (with which many of us are familiar) specifically rejects the concept of sub-fossil in favour of fossil; you are either alive, or a fossil.
 
So we seem to be using a term for which there is no formal definition in our older sister disciplines (geology and palaeontology).  That might make many of us somewhat nervous, but there are plenty of us, lots of us are quite bright, and we all seem to know what we mean when using the term.  There is no real reason we should wait for the older sisters to define terms for us (after all, they can't even tell us for certain what killed off either of their favourite critters, the dinosaurs or the trilobites). So let's just define the term ourselves formally: a ten-word paper in a well-known journal would do (how about it, editors of J.Arch.Sci or Environmental Archaeology?).  
 
Then it will be up to the geologists and palaeontologists (Quaternary or not) to hunt through their literature and prove they did invent it.
 
Greg Campbell