How to Use fossilize in a Sentence

fossilize

verb
Definition of fossilizenext
  • The mud helped to preserve and fossilize the wood.
  • Those bones were built by genes, which do not fossilize.
    — Carl Zimmer, Discover Magazine, 10 Dec. 2012
  • In my mind a few of them are fossilized in their teenage awfulness.
    — Mike Kerrigan, WSJ, 29 Mar. 2019
  • Although sharks are not composed of bone, these fish can fossilize.
    — Olivia Munson, USA TODAY, 9 Aug. 2022
  • And yet the office is fossilized, like a gift-shop lollipop with a scorpion wedged inside, stuck in the time of pants.
    — Chloe Berger, Fortune, 24 July 2023
  • In fact, some specimens have even been found with the remains of crustaceans fossilized in their throats.
    — Sara Novak, Discover Magazine, 27 June 2023
  • The skeleton is made of soft cartilage that doesn’t fossilize well, Pimiento said.
    — Maddie Burakoff, ajc, 17 Aug. 2022
  • Almost all of the other fossilized T.rexes are housed in museums, which makes the sale of Trinity very rare.
    — Rachel Cormack, Robb Report, 30 Mar. 2023
  • Shark skeletons are made of cartilage, which does not fossilize as well as bone — so it is rarely preserved.
    — CBS News, 30 Jan. 2020
  • The soft tissue was first to fossilize, encasing the 3D network of collagen-like fibers that formed the sponge’s skeleton.
    — Washington Post, 29 July 2021
  • As these life-forms die, they will be fossilized, leaving a permanent 12C mark of the Anthropocene.
    — Jan Zalasiewicz, Scientific American, 1 Dec. 2016
  • The soft tissue was first to fossilize, encasing the 3-D network of collagen-like fibers that formed the sponge's skeleton.
    — BostonGlobe.com, 29 July 2021
  • Does it give you any ideas about what material the plant or animal might have been fossilized in?
    — Nicole Daniels, New York Times, 20 Mar. 2020
  • The skull fossilized within the sandstone, to the delight of the scientists who discovered the cranium in 2016.
    — Ben Guarino, Anchorage Daily News, 29 Aug. 2019
  • Keratin doesn’t fossilize well, but melanosomes often do.
    — Meilan Solly, Smithsonian, 28 June 2019
  • His team’s discovery marks the first time brains from any human or animal have been found fossilized as glass.
    — Washington Post, 23 Jan. 2020
  • Scientists then have to judge whether the dinosaur only had feathers on some of their body in life, or whether they were fully cloaked and then some of their plumage failed to fossilize.
    — Carl Zimmer, Discover Magazine, 4 Apr. 2012
  • Over time, sediment buried the bones, which fossilized and drifted with the continents to what is now northeastern France.
    — Matt Hrodey, Discover Magazine, 21 Nov. 2023
  • Together, these behaviors open up options in a field that has been fossilized for decades.
    — Marion Blank, Scientific American, 26 Sep. 2023
  • Shark bodies are largely made of this firm, white connective substance—which does not fossilize well.
    — Erin Biba, Scientific American, 22 May 2017
  • Shark bodies are largely made of this firm, white connective substance—which does not fossilize well.
    — Erin Biba, Scientific American, 1 June 2017
  • Animals this small do not fossilize well, which is why this stage of the distant evolutionary past is so little known.
    — Nicholas Wade, New York Times, 30 Jan. 2017
  • But this flight adaptation makes pterosaur skeletons less likely to fossilize intact, leaving them scarce in the fossil record.
    — Alex Fox, Smithsonian Magazine, 3 Apr. 2020
  • Brains almost never fossilize, so researchers must scrutinize impressions in the skull left behind by the brain’s grooves, folds, and bulges.
    — Michael Price, Science | AAAS, 8 Apr. 2021
  • The fried pigskin sprinkles, which usually add a welcome crackle to the sandwich, have fossilized into something hard and tooth-rattling.
    — Tim Carman, Washington Post, 20 Dec. 2023
  • My mom emigrated from South Korea in 1967, bringing a set of flavors, techniques and recipes that would fossilize from that moment.
    — Cammie Kim Lin, Washington Post, 9 Apr. 2023
  • This created a rock replica of the animal’s brain as a specimen fossilized.
    — Laura Baisas, Popular Science, 28 Mar. 2023
  • Because shark skeletons are made of soft cartilage, which doesn't fossilize well, most of what scientists know about ancient sharks comes from teeth, scales and fin spine fossils.
    — Lauren Kent, CNN, 28 Nov. 2019
  • This was not a small, delicate creature unlikely to fossilize.
    — Brian Switek, Scientific American Blog Network, 17 May 2017
  • That’s because the animals had skeletons made of cartilage, which does not fossilize as easily as bone.
    — Jason Daley, Smithsonian, 3 Oct. 2019

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'fossilize.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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