Fossil Word Search Printable

Print 16 fossil words with an answer key, or swap in the dig list or the ages of the Earth.

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Fossil Word Search

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0 of 16 words found

ABSEFOSSILMYIVA

QSHXHRPMKKIABUS

DEECDGTRIYWYUST

ADLAYERSSEETREU

TILVDRSFIMPRINT

IMWANEAATKUIASC

REXTINCTIONLLOA

ANQEHOLMAMMOTHM

OTBDKSSBRREBWNB

PALEONTOLOGISTR

GCGCABUNOAUTEEI

JANANCIEDYREIBA

IRNYAEYFSOERWNN

INRSTDREMAINSEA

ODDPNMOLDODBNAM

This grid is wider and taller than its box. Slide it to see every letter.To drag, hold the first letter for a moment, then slide.Keyboard: Tab to the grid, arrow keys to move, Enter on the first and last letter.

MoldMOLD
ImprintIMPRINT
BoneBONE
ShellSHELL
FossilFOSSIL
BurialBURIAL
SedimentSEDIMENT
LayersLAYERS
DecayDECAY
RemainsREMAINS
PaleontologistPALEONTOLOGIST
ExcavateEXCAVATE
CambrianCAMBRIAN
ExtinctionEXTINCTION
TrilobiteTRILOBITE
MammothMAMMOTH

16 of 23 words from the Fossil Key Terms list.

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Word list

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Answer key: Fossil Word Search

ABSEFOSSILMYIVA

QSHXHRPMKKIABUS

DEECDGTRIYWYUST

ADLAYERSSEETREU

TILVDRSFIMPRINT

IMWANEAATKUIASC

REXTINCTIONLLOA

ANQEHOLMAMMOTHM

OTBDKSSBRREBWNB

PALEONTOLOGISTR

GCGCABUNOAUTEEI

JANANCIEDYREIBA

IRNYAEYFSOERWNN

INRSTDREMAINSEA

ODDPNMOLDODBNAM

MOLD, IMPRINT, BONE, SHELL, FOSSIL, BURIAL, SEDIMENT, LAYERS, DECAY, REMAINS, PALEONTOLOGIST, EXCAVATE, CAMBRIAN, EXTINCTION, TRILOBITE, MAMMOTH

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All 111 words

Kinds of Fossil 23

Amber Fossilized tree resin; things can be preserved inside it.
Body fossil The fossilized remains of part of an organism, as opposed to a trace.
Bone A hard part of a skeleton; an example of preserved remains.
Burrow A hole an animal dug; with tracks, the main kind of trace fossil.
Cast What forms when a mold fills with sediment; it looks like the original.
Compression A fossil squeezed flat in sedimentary rock; plants are very often preserved this way.
Coprolite Fossilized feces; it gives evidence of what an animal ate.
Exoskeleton The hard outer covering of an invertebrate; an example of preserved remains.
Footprint A fossilized one is called an ichnite.
Gastrolith A stomach stone: a rock held in the gut, in some animals to grind food.
Imprint A mark left in stone by an animal or a microbe.
Index fossil A distinctive species that gives its name to a zone of rock layers.
Microfossil A fossil between one micrometre and one millimetre in size, studied by microscopy.
Mold A hole in rock in the shape of remains that dissolved away.
Petrified wood Wood that has been replaced by stone.

Show all 111 words (96 more)

Kinds of Fossil, continued

Pseudofossil A pattern in rock that imitates a fossil but was made by geology, not by life.
Resin The tree product that fossilizes into amber.
Shell The hard cover of a sea animal; pyrite can take the place of its material.
Stromatolite A layered formation built mainly by photosynthetic microorganisms.
Subfossil Holocene remains too old to count as modern.
Tar pit A pool of natural asphalt; a cluster in Los Angeles holds mammoth and bison remains.
Trace fossil A record of what a living thing did, such as a burrow, and not of its body.
Track A fossil footprint; a row left by one animal is a trackway.

How a Fossil Forms 22

Anoxic Without oxygen; burial in such a place can delay decay.
Burial Being covered over; the word taphonomy comes from the Greek for it.
Cement To bind sediment into rock; sedimentary rock forms this way.
Compress To squeeze flat, as rock does to a buried plant.
Decay What organisms do after death; taphonomy studies it.
Deposit A body of sediment laid down in one place; a few preserve fossils exceptionally well.
Dissolve What the original remains do when only a mold is left.
Fossil Any preserved remains, impression or trace of a thing that once lived in a past geological age.
Layers Strata; where they are undisturbed, the oldest lie at the bottom.
Minerals Carried by water, they fill the spaces inside bone and other tissue.
Opal A mineral that can take the shape of the original remains, as agate can.
Organism A living thing.
Petrify To turn to stone; from a Greek word for rock.
Preserve To keep remains from being destroyed.
Pyrite A mineral of iron and sulfide that can take the place of shell material.
Quartz One form the replacing mineral can take, keeping the shape of the original remains.
Remains What is left of a living thing; a fossil is these, or a trace.
Replace What stone does to the wood of a buried tree, in the making of petrified wood.
Sediment Particles of mineral or organic matter laid down at the Earth's surface.
Soft tissue The parts that are preserved only in exceptional deposits.
Stratum One layer of rock or sediment; the plural is strata.
Taphonomy The study of how organisms decay and become fossilized.

The Fossil Dig 20

Asphalt The natural tar at La Brea, which has seeped up for tens of thousands of years.
Cliffs Where Mary Anning found Jurassic sea fossils, along the English Channel.
Collector A person who gathers fossils, as Mary Anning did at Lyme Regis.
Dig site The area being studied in an excavation.
Discovery A find; Mary Anning's included the first ichthyosaur skeleton to be identified correctly.
Excavate To expose, process and record remains at a site.
Fragile Easily broken, as many fossils are.
Hand lens A low-powered magnifier, enough for studying a fossil larger than a millimetre.
Overburden The modern material on top of a site, which is removed first.
Paleontologist A scientist who studies the life of the past, mainly through fossils.
Plaster A liquid that hardens; poured into a mold of a fossil, it makes a copy.
Record To note what was found and where; a dig cannot be repeated.
Replica A copy; one stands in for a fossil too fragile to display or transport.
Shovel A digging tool; in the US a kind of small test pit is named after it.
Sieve To sift soil so that small items such as bones are recovered.
Specimen A single fossil kept for study.
Spoil The earth dug out of an excavation.
Stratigraphy The study of rock layers; the law of superposition is one of its bases.
Trench A long, narrow cut dug to test a site.
Trowel A hand tool; cleaning back the surface of a site is named after it.

Ages of the Earth 24

Cambrian The period in which trilobites first appear, about 521 million years ago.
Carboniferous The fifth period of the Paleozoic; some limestone of this age is nearly all crinoids.
Cenozoic The current era: the last 66 million years.
Cretaceous The last period of the Mesozoic; its end is marked by an asteroid impact.
Devonian The period in which the earliest ammonoids appeared, around 410 million years ago.
Eon The largest unit of geologic time; four are formally defined.
Extinction The end of a species, at the death of its last member.
Geologic Describes the time scale that divides the Earth's history of about 4.54 billion years.
Holocene The current epoch; mammoths lived on into it until about 4,000 years ago.
Jurassic The age of the sea fossils that Mary Anning found at Lyme Regis.
Mesozoic The middle era, about 252 to 66 million years ago, with three periods.
Neogene The second period of the Cenozoic, split into the Miocene and the Pliocene.
Ordovician The second period of the Paleozoic, named after a tribe.
Paleogene The first period of the Cenozoic; an extinction event marks its start.
Paleozoic The first of three eras of the Phanerozoic, with six periods.
Permian The last period of the Paleozoic; the last trilobites disappeared at its end.
Phanerozoic The current eon, which began with the Cambrian.
Proterozoic One of the three eons of the Precambrian, the time before the Phanerozoic.
Quaternary The current period.
Radiometric The kind of dating that compares a radioactive isotope with its decay products.
Relative The kind of dating that puts events in order without giving their age in years.
Silurian The third period of the Paleozoic; trilobites were still diverse in it.
Superposition The law that in undisturbed layers the oldest lie at the bottom.
Triassic The first period of the Mesozoic; belemnites existed from late in it.

Fossil Animals and Plants 22

Ammonite An extinct sea animal with a coiled shell, related to squid and octopuses.
Arthropod The group of animals that trilobites belonged to.
Belemnite An extinct squid-like animal with an internal skeleton.
Bison A large, humped grazing mammal; an ancient kind was found in the tar pits of Los Angeles.
Brachiopod A sea animal with hard shells on its upper and lower surfaces, hinged at the rear.
Cephalopod The group that holds squid, octopuses and the extinct ammonites.
Clam A shellfish with a two-part shell; its remains are among the small finds at La Brea.
Crinoid A sea animal; the kinds fixed to the sea floor by a stalk are called sea lilies.
Dire wolf An extinct canine of the Americas; the largest collection of its fossils is from La Brea.
Feather star A crinoid that has no stalk.
Fish A water animal with fins and gills; among the small finds at La Brea, with turtles.
Ginkgo A tree of East Asia, the last living species of its order; widely regarded as a living fossil.
Ground sloth An extinct mammal, some kinds as big as elephants; a giant one was found at La Brea.
Horse A hoofed animal that people ride; ancient western ones were found at the La Brea Tar Pits.
Ichthyosaur Mary Anning found the first skeleton of one to be correctly identified, at twelve.
Mammoth An extinct relative of living elephants, with spirally twisted tusks.
Nautilus A living animal whose shell an ammonite's resembles.
Saber-tooth Describes an extinct cat with very long upper canine teeth; the state fossil of California.
Sea urchin A sea animal whose five-rayed fossil shells ancient Egyptians linked to a star god.
Snail A small animal with a coiled shell; its remains are among the small finds at La Brea.
Squid A living relative of the ammonites; belemnites were shaped like it.
Trilobite An extinct sea arthropod whose name means three-lobed; it lasted almost 270 million years.

How this list was compiled: Own work: the word list and every clue were written for this page. The facts in the clues were checked on 2026-10-07 against English Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0), among them the articles on the fossil (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil), the trace fossil (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trace_fossil), the geologic time scale (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_time_scale), the trilobite (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trilobite) and Mary Anning (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Anning). Licence: own work

How it works

This printable fossil word search sorts 111 words the way a unit does: the kinds of fossil, how one forms, the dig, the ages of the Earth, and the animals and plants that turn up as fossils.

Read the full guide

From Cambrian to Quaternary

Ages of the Earth holds the twelve periods from the Cambrian on: Cambrian, Ordovician, Silurian, Devonian, Carboniferous, Permian, Triassic, Jurassic, Cretaceous, Paleogene, Neogene and Quaternary, with the three eras they belong to. The clues tie a period to a fossil: trilobites first appear in the Cambrian, and the last disappear at the end of the Permian.

Trace fossils, molds and casts

Kinds of Fossil has 23 words, among them Mold, Cast, Amber, Coprolite, Gastrolith, Trace fossil and Index fossil. The Fossil Dig has 20, from Trowel and Sieve to Plaster and Overburden. Easy Fossils keeps to 18 words of 3 to 5 letters, such as Bone, Shell, Track and Squid.

Cambrian reads inside Precambrian, so the list has Proterozoic and Phanerozoic and leaves Precambrian to a clue.
Trace fossil, Index fossil and Petrified wood each hide as one run of letters: TRACEFOSSIL.

Questions and answers

What are the types of fossils?

Body fossils are the preserved remains of an organism, such as bones and shells. Trace fossils record what it did: tracks, burrows and coprolites. Molds and casts copy a shape, and amber is fossilized tree resin.

How does a fossil form?

In many ways. In permineralization, minerals carried by water fill the spaces in bone and other tissue. Remains can also dissolve and leave a mold, be replaced by minerals, or be pressed flat in sedimentary rock.

How old does something have to be to be a fossil?

Specimens are sometimes considered fossils once they pass 10,000 years in age. The oldest known fossils date back some 3.48 billion to 4.1 billion years.

Does the fossil word search have an answer key?

Yes, as page 2 on Letter or A4. For dinosaur names to go with the fossils, print the dinosaur word search.

All 111 words

Kinds of Fossil 23

Kinds of Fossil, continued

How a Fossil Forms 22

The Fossil Dig 20

Ages of the Earth 24

Fossil Animals and Plants 22

How it works

From Cambrian to Quaternary

Trace fossils, molds and casts

Questions and answers

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