Topic summary
Chemical fossils
Extracted from the Wikipedia article Biosignature.
Chemistry
Petroleum biomarkers are highly important in petroleum inspection as they help indicate the depositional territories and determine the geological properties of oils. For instance, they provide more details concerning their maturity and the source material. In addition to that they can also be good parameters of age, hence they are technically referred to as "chemical fossils". The ratio of pristane to phytane (pr:ph) is the geochemical factor that allows petroleum biomarkers to be successful indicators of their depositional environments.