Question: What type of fossil is most common?

Rehemat Bhatia answered on 5 Mar 2018:

Hmm that’s tough. So in every area of the world you will have a common fossil. For example, in Lyme Regis in the UK we can find lots of ammonites in comparison to other places nearby.

But in terms of what type of complete fossil exists the most in comparison to bigger organisms that we might find incomplete e.g. dinosaurs, mammals, animals without a backbone e.g. sea-snails, trilobites, ammonites, I’d say shelled microscopic fossils. These can come in many forms, but the ones we can find the most are foraminifera (plankton made from calcium carbonate) and nannoplankton (we can see these as algal blooms off coasts of different countries, they are algae with a calcium carbonate shell). These have extensive fossil records and we can find their remains all over the world on the sea floor. A ship called the JOIDES Resolution (http://joidesresolution.org/) goes out on scienfic cruises every 3 months (with a group of around 30 scientists) and brings back hundreds of metres of what is essentially mud, that we can find microscopic shelled fossils in.