Science Alert has an interesting story about whether humans will leave a signature in the fossil record.  We have had a huge impact on the current direction of life on Earth, but will any of that impact be preserved in the fossil record… that is subject to much debate.

Today, the vast majority of scientists agree that humans are causing unprecedented changes to our planet. Yet whether that warrants delineating an entirely new epoch is something geologists continue to disagree on.

Some think the impact of humans is now so great, it exceeds the natural processes of the Holocene, while others argue there’s no clear marker in the geological record of the age of humans – the so-called Anthropocene.

Palaeontologists Roy Plotnick and Karen Koy fall in the former category, and they think our fossil record is a dead give-away. In a new paper, the pair argue that in the far future – say, a hundred thousand years from now – fossils of our age will point unmistakably towards humans.

Rather morbidly, they call it the “corpse signal”, and it’s entirely our fault. Since humans have been on this Earth, the total biomass of wild mammals has fallen by as much as 65 percent; at the same time, the overall biomass of mammals has quadrupled.

The main reason for this tip of the scales is a huge and continuous growth in livestock and humans. This suggests that today, cows, pigs and chickens are far more likely to become “potential fossils”.