Where’s the best place to be buried to preserve your body as a fossil?

If I wanted to be buried so that I was eventually fossilised, for possible discovery in the far future, where would be the best location on Earth to do this?

Jonathan Wallace

Newcastle upon Tyne, UK

If your aim is to be fossilised after you die, I would suggest that you ask your relatives to sink your body rapidly into one of the “dead zones” that occur in some of the world’s seas.

Where large rivers meet the sea, the massive organic load sometimes results in low-oxygen conditions over vast areas that are largely devoid of most living organisms.

In such anoxic conditions, your body is unlikely to get eaten by fish, crustaceans or other scavengers. At the same time, the huge amount of sediment coming from the river as the current slows should ensure that your body will be rapidly covered by layers of sediment that will potentially become sedimentary rock in aeons to come.

A good location might be in the Gulf of Mexico, in the area where the Mississippi disgorges itself. Parts of the Black Sea would also be good candidates.

Jon Noad

Calgary, Alberta, Canada

There are many ways to get fossilised. If you want the process to go quickly, then find a tree that exudes resin. Leave your body at the base of the tree and allow the resin to gradually cover it.

Eventually, the resin will turn to amber. The only problem is that you would need to find a very large tree, because the amount of amber created by this process is generally quite small. It might be possible to fossilise your head, but probably not your whole body.

Other places where at least parts of your body could be encased in sediment include streams that run through limestone. The dissolved lime (calcium oxide) precipitates as travertine, a sedimentary rock that is a form of limestone rather like the calcium carbonate that coats the element in your kettle. Travertine can quickly cover small items.

A slower yet perhaps more straightforward approach would be to bury your body beneath the sea or a lake bed, in an area where there is little oxygen permeating into the substrate, so that scavengers cannot invade the sediment and eat you.

Many soda lakes in Africa fit this profile, although their alkali water can be caustic, and might eat away at your remains. But the calcified remains of animals found around Lake Natron in Tanzania suggest that this method could work.

Choose a lake with slow-moving currents, because the sediment being deposited will be fine-grained. This will lead to less disturbance and to better preservation of your soft parts as a black carbon film, and with luck may even preserve your facial features. Deep sea beds should also work well, which is what created the famous Burgess Shale in British Columbia, Canada, for example.

The best option may be northern Australian coast. The unique geochemistry of the mangrove muds lead to animals such as mangrove lobsters (Thalassina anomala) becoming fossilised in as little as 5000 years.

Burying your corpse here should guarantee fossilisation, with the bonus that a nodule called a concretion will form around you that will preserve your skeleton in three dimensions.

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