What Will Humans Leave Behind in the Fossil Record?

About 2.5 billion Tyrannosaurus rex walked the Earth, and museums have found roughly one in every 80 million. If the most famous predator in history left almost nothing, what will the rock keep of us? This film follows the long filter that turns a body into a fossil, then looks at what humanity is adding right now: concrete, plastic, chicken bones in landfills, plutonium from nuclear tests. We visit a lake in Ontario where the year 1952 is written in mud, the 2024 vote that rejected the Anthropocene and the 2026 dispute over it, the Silurian Hypothesis about a possible earlier industrial civilization, and Finland's Onkalo repository, built to last 100,000 years. Based on research published from 2018 to 2026. If deep-time science matters to you, please SUBSCRIBE    / @chroniclesplanetearth   to the channel. Sources: Marshall C. R. et al. (2021). Absolute abundance and preservation rate of Tyrannosaurus rex. Science. Elhacham E. et al. (2020). Global human-made mass exceeds all living biomass. Nature. Gabbott S., Zalasiewicz J. (2025). Discarded: How Technofossils Will Be Our Enduring Legacy. Anthropocene Working Group (2023). Crawford Lake as the proposed GSSP of the Anthropocene. AWG Newsletter 13. IUGS (2024). Statement on the Anthropocene, 20 March 2024. Nature (2026). Battle of the Anthropocene: allegations re-ignite row over proposed geological epoch. Schäfer G. et al. (2026). Earth's Future, doi 10.1029/2025EF007638. ScienceAlert / AFP (2026). The world's first nuclear waste tomb is nearly ready to open. AP (2026). Finland's plan to bury spent nuclear waste carries risk to future generations.