1. [n]  the remains (or an impression) of a plant or animal that existed in a past geological age and that has been excavated from the soil
2. [n]  (informal) someone whose style is out of fashion
3. [adj]  characteristic of a fossil

Fossil
A photo essay about different types of fossils, from bacteria and algae to birds and mammals.

more details ...

1. \Fos"sil\, a. [L. fossilis, fr. fodere to dig: cf. F.
   fossile. See {Fosse}.]
   1. Dug out of the earth; as, fossil coal; fossil salt.
   2. (Paleon.) Like or pertaining to fossils; contained in
      rocks, whether petrified or not; as, fossil plants,
      shells.
   {Fossil copal}, a resinous substance, first found in the blue
      clay at Highgate, near London, and apparently a vegetable
      resin, partly changed by remaining in the earth.
   {Fossil cork}, {flax}, {paper}, or {wood}, varieties of
      amianthus.
   {Fossil farina}, a soft carbonate of lime.
   {Fossil ore}, fossiliferous red hematite. --Raymond.
   

2. \Fos"sil\, n.
   1. A substance dug from the earth. [Obs.]
   Note: Formerly all minerals were called fossils, but the word
         is now restricted to express the remains of animals and
         plants found buried in the earth. --Ure.
   2. (Paleon.) The remains of an animal or plant found in
      stratified rocks. Most fossils belong to extinct species,
      but many of the later ones belong to species still living.
   3. A person whose views and opinions are extremely
      antiquated; one whose sympathies are with a former time
      rather than with the present. [Colloq.]
   

1. In software, a misfeature that becomes understandable only in historical context, as a remnant of times past retained so as not to break compatibility. Example: the retention of octal as default base for string escapes in C, in spite of the better match of hexadecimal to ASCII and modern byte-addressable architectures. See dusty deck.

2. More restrictively, a feature with past but no present utility. Example: the force-all-caps (LCASE) bits in the V7 and BSD Unix tty driver, designed for use with monocase terminals. (In a perversion of the usual backward-compatibility goal, this functionality has actually been expanded and renamed in some later USG Unix releases as the IUCLC and OLCUC bits.)

3. The FOSSIL (Fido/Opus/Seadog Standard Interface Level) driver specification for serial-port access to replace the brain-dead routines in the IBM PC ROMs. Fossils are used by most MS-DOS BBS software in preference to the "supported" ROM routines, which do not support interrupt-driven operation or setting speeds above 9600; the use of a semistandard FOSSIL library is preferable to the bare metal serial port programming otherwise required. Since the FOSSIL specification allows additional functionality to be hooked in, drivers that use the hook but do not provide serial-port access themselves are named with a modifier, as in "video fossil".

[Jargon File]