Fossils can present clues to how plants and animals lived up to now – what they appeared like, what they ate, what environments they lived in, and how they advanced and went extinct. For hundreds of millions of years, the remains of organisms (as nicely as tracks, trails, and burrows – known as trace fossils) had been the vast wooplus com majority of the clues left behind in Earth’s fossil report. A fossil can be studied to find out what kind of organism it represents, how the organism lived, and the way it was preserved.