Meaning of living fossil | Babel Free

Definitions

1. Any species discovered first as a fossil and believed extinct, but which is later found living; an organism that has remained unchanged over geological periods.
2. Any living species which very closely resembles fossil relatives in most anatomical details.

Equivalents

Examples

“The coelacanth and the dawn redwood are living fossils.”

“[I]n fresh water we find some of the most anomalous forms now known in the world, as the Ornithorhynchus and Lepidosiren, which, like fossils, connect to a certain extent orders now widely separated in the natural scale. These anomalous forms may almost be called living fossils; they have endured to the present day, from having inhabited a confined area, and from having thus been exposed to less severe competition.”

“The Gingko, whose single existing species was aptly termed a living fossil by [Charles] Darwin and which survived to modern times only in eastern Asia and is now a prized ornamental tree in all temperate countries, has an ancestral history that goes back to remote geologic time.”

“It features in textbooks as well, a prime example of a "living fossil", a reminder of past glories now hanging on in a last-ditch action against final extinction. But is nautilus really an anachronism?”

“Angus: Impossible! If what you say is true, he'd have to be thousands of years old. / Rothie: Astounding! The age-o-meter dates your particles all the way back to 25 B.A., twenty-five years before Aku enslaved the Earth. You, my friend, are a living fossil. / Jack: So the question is not where I am but when I am. […] The spell Aku cast must have ripped me from my own time and flung me into the distant future.”

“Crocodiles are living fossils that haven’t changed their appearance much in millions of years.”

“Living in apparently splendid ease, travelling with a retinue of seventy, demanding the many courtesies due to a peer of the realm, exacting from his many manors rents and incidentals such as private wardships, in exactly the same way as did the lay lords, and making the most of his public appearances in the role either of judge or of administrator, [Matthew] Parker seemed to some an anachronism. He seemed to be a living fossil from 'the days of popery' (as contemporaries, lacking an historical sense and groping for an expression adequate to convey what they meant, called the medieval era).”

“There are four living families of Anaspidacea, but only the Anaspididae are of interest in the context of "living fossils" since they bear the closest resemblance to the extinct Palaeocaridacea.”

“These relics of Europe’s dawning are deserving of special recognition, for they are in effect Europe’s living fossils, as precious as the platypus and lungfish.”

“Tucker-Brown explained how lemurs—like much of the “stranded” flora and fauna of Madagascar—are effectively living fossils. Belonging to a primate group called prosimians, lemurs were evolutionarily superseded by monkeys on mainland Africa 35mn years ago and driven to near-extinction.”

CEFR level