Every fossil is a small miracle. As author Bill Bryson notes in his book A Short History of Nearly Everything, only an estimated one bone in a billion gets fossilised. By that calculation the entire fossil legacy of the 320-odd million people alive in the US today will equate to approximately 60 bones – or a little over a quarter of a human skeleton.

But that’s just the chance of getting fossilised in the first place. Assuming this handful of bones could be buried anywhere in the US’s 9.8 million sq km (3.8 million square miles), then the chances of anyone finding these bones in the future are almost non-existent.

Fossilisation is so unlikely that scientists estimate that less one-tenth of 1% of all the animal species that have ever lived have become fossils. Far fewer of them have been found.

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As humans, we have a couple of things going for us: we have hard skeletons and we’re relatively large. So we’re much more likely to make it than a jellyfish or a worm. There are things, however, you can do to increase your chances of success.

Taphonomy is the study of burial, decay and preservation – the entire process of what happens after an organism dies and eventually becomes a fossil. To answer the question of how to become a fossil, BBC Future spoke with some of the world’s top taphonomists.

1. Get buried, and quickly



“It’s really a question of maintaining a good condition of the body after death – long enough to be buried under sediment and then altered physically and chemically deep underground to become a fossil,” says Sue Beardmore, a taphonomist and collections assistant at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History.

“To be preserved for millions of years, you must also survive the first hours, days, seasons, decades, centuries, and thousands of years,” adds Susan Kidwell, a professor at the University of Chicago. “That is, you must survive the initial transition from the ‘taphonomically active zone’… to a zone of permanent burial, where your remains are unlikely to be exhumed.”

There are almost endless ways that fossilisation can fail. Many of these happen at, or down to 20-50cm below, the soil or seafloor surface. You don’t want your remains to be eaten and scattered by scavengers, for example, or exposed to the elements for too long. And you don’t want them to be bored into or shifted around by burrowing animals.