This helps out expeditions and allows us to help teach our friends there. That's a hard question, as our teams have found more than 50 new species of fossil mammals and reptiles over the years. Right now, I'm very excited about our discoveries of what may be the oldest dinosaurs in the world- 230 million year old prosauropods from Madagascar. The chances of a plant or animal becoming a fossil after it dies are very rare, so finding it is even rarer. Paleontologists try to go to places with rocks of the right age and conditions to preserve a fossil at the time it died, and where there isn't so much plant cover today that we can't see the rocks.
Paleontology is the study of all life, archeology is the study of human remains and cultures only.
Rock hammers, chisels, picks, needles, brooms, dental tools, magnifiers, special glues and even rock saws. We often wrap plaster around the delicate fossils to protect them. It forms a hard plaster cast around the fossil, just like when a doctor protects a broken leg with a cast. The changes in fossils actually are some of the best ways to tell geologic time. One of the most important things is to observe nature.