Definition for Bioimmuration
From Biology Forums Dictionary
Bioimmuration is a type of preservation in which a skeletal organism overgrows or otherwise subsumes another organism, preserving the latter, or an impression of it, within the skeleton. Usually it is a sessile skeletal organism, such as a bryozoan or an oyster, which grows along a substrate, covering other sessile encrusters.
Sometimes the bioimmured organism is soft-bodied and is then preserved in negative relief as a kind of external mold. There are also cases where an organism settles on top of a living skeletal organism and grows upwards, preserving the settler in its skeleton. Bioimmuration is known in the fossil record from the Ordovician to the Recent. To sum up, fossilization processes proceed differently for different kinds of tissues and under different kinds of conditions.