Editing Taphonomy (section)

===Temporal resolution===
Because population turnover rates of individual taxa are much less than net rates of sediment accumulation, the biological remains of successive, noncontemporaneous populations of organisms may be admixed within a single bed, known as '''time-averaging'''. Because of the slow and episodic nature of the geologic record, two apparently contemporaneous fossils may have actually lived centuries, or even millennia, apart. Moreover, the ''degree'' of time-averaging in an assemblage may vary. The degree varies on many factors, such as tissue type, the habitat, the frequency of burial events and [[exhumation]] events, and the depth of [[bioturbation]] within the sedimentary column relative to net sediment accumulation rates. Like biases in spatial fidelity, there is a bias towards organisms that can survive reworking events, such as [[Exoskeleton|shell]]s. An example of a more ideal deposit with respect to time-averaging bias would be a [[volcanic ash]] deposit, which captures an entire biota caught in the wrong place at the wrong time (e.g. the [[Silurian]] [[Coalbrookdale Formation|Herefordshire lagerstätte]]).