Question: Are there different groups of fossils and if there are how many?

Duncan Murdock answered on 24 Mar 2010:

There are thousand of different types of fossil which can be put into hundreds of different groups, just like animals and plants alive today. We put animals and plants in groups based on how closely related they are to other animals and plants.

For example; dogs (a species) are most closely related to wolves, so with put them into a group together (the genus Canis), then we add the next closest animals like hyenas and foxes, this makes a family (Canidae). Next we can add related families, like cats and bears, to make an order (in this case the Carnivora). We can then make a class by adding all the mammal orders together (including our own, the primates), and if we put together everything with a backbone we get to our phylum (the chordates). Finally we know all animals are related, so we can add all the phyla (that’s more than one phylum) to make the kingdom Animalia.

We can do exactly the same with fossil animals, by doing this we can build up a tree of relationships. If you’re interested visit http://tolweb.org/tree/phylogeny.html and search for your favourite animal or fossil to see which groups it fits into.