 From looking at rocks, you can actually tell the impalean environment of which they were deposited. Paleoenvironment refers to what climate and the conditions of the climate in terms of temperature, glaciation, different rainfalls that the rocks were actually deposited during. So there's many different ways that you can tell these kind of things, all the way from graded beddings to which fossils are included to different inclusions like dropstones. So something as simple as just the colouring of the rock can tell you a lot about the depositional environment. For example, if you had a sedimentary rock with lots of layered bedding, if you had one that was significantly more red or orangey colour, you can tell that there was more oxygen in the atmosphere, which led to oxidisation like rust, which produced the red colour. This occurred at a time like the Great Oxidisation event where the oxygen in the atmosphere was severely increased. So the internal texture of a rock can tell us a lot about the environment that it was also deposited in. So in sedimentary rocks, there's generally what's called a finding upward sequence where you've got the coarser grains down the bottom, which find up to finer grains towards the top. Another internal texture that we can look at are ripple marks. So in an environment that has water, you have water flowing along the sediments. So if you have a calm and slow paced flow of water, the sediments are laid flat and there generally no ripple marks. Whereas if the water is fast, you can get ripple marks, which show the flow and how fast the water moved through it. One of the other really cool things that you can see in sedimentary rocks that tell you about the past environments is something called dropstones. When there's a glaciation, as the glacier moves over land, it picks up large folders or pebble size objects and then as the glacier melts and ice riffs, it will slowly start to drop these stones into the sediments and then they get lithified over and you'll have a dropstone preserved in the rock, which can then tell you that glaciation occurred in the past. So in marine environments, you can find some things which are known as crinoids, which have a flower at the top and then a stem. These are generally formed in either shallow marine environments or deep marine environments. You can also find brachyopods, which are like shells, which I'm sure most of you have seen along beaches that you've been to, and these are also formed in shallow marine environments. And lastly, you can have these things that are called grapidolites, which are formed in deeper marine environments. So whether the fossils are formed in deep or shallow marine can give you an indication of how the environment has changed over time. So for example, the shallow marine of the brachyopods and the crinoids is very different to that of the grapidolites. And then overall, you can see the abundance and the number of fossil species that can give you an indication of the types of predators and how stable the environment was when they formed. So next time you see a rock, maybe pick it up, have a look, see what you can find. Can you see fossils? Can you see great embedding? Is there any cool things like dropstones present? And have a think about where this possibly could have been to positive. What environments, what time, and what was the climate like back then?