Fossils can present clues to how crops and animals lived prior to now – what they seemed like, what they ate, what environments they lived in, and how they advanced and went extinct. For lots of of hundreds of thousands of years, the remains of organisms (as properly as tracks, trails, and burrows – known as hint fossils) have been the majority of the clues left behind in Earth’s fossil record. A fossil may be studied to determine what type of organism it represents, how the organism lived, and the method it was preserved.