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Fossil

Buried skulls and spines made of bone blocks, with ore mixed in. Players dig them up for displays and bone meal, and the deeper ones can hold diamonds.

No screenshot yetPlaceholder: we have not captured a fossil in game.

From the Minecraft Wiki, summarised

How it generates

Fossils generate in two height bands, Y=0 to 320 and Y=-63 to -8, usually about 5–30 blocks below the surface. Upper fossils carry coal ore; deeper ones can carry diamond ore.

Biomes

  • Desert
  • Swamp
  • Mangrove Swamp

Fossils are features, not structures, so they have no spacing grid or structure ID. Java 26.3 uses minecraft:fossil_coal and minecraft:fossil_diamonds, each picking from eight templates. Each chunk gets two attempts, one per height band, and each has a 1 in 64 chance. Those rates and heights may be out of date. Bedrock's placement numbers aren't confirmed. Generate Structures doesn't turn fossils off, and nothing spawns with them. Nether fossils are a separate structure. Java added fossils in the Frostburn Update.

Variants

  • Skull 1 · Largest skull template.
  • Skull 2 · Second-largest skull template.
  • Skull 3 · Second-smallest skull template.
  • Skull 4 · Smallest, one-eyed skull template.
  • Spine 1 · Narrowest spine template.
  • Spine 2 · Second-narrowest spine template.
  • Spine 3 · Second-widest spine template.
  • Spine 4 · Widest spine template.

Notable loot

  • Bone Block (salvage)
  • Coal (mined from the upper ore overlay)
  • Diamond (mined from the lower ore overlay)

History

  1. 1.10Java

    Introduced fossils in snapshot 16w20a.

  2. 1.1.3Bedrock

    Added fossils to Pocket Edition.

  3. 1.16Java

    Prevented fossils from overwriting desert pyramids and stronghold End portal rooms.

  4. 1.17 (21w10a)Java

    Experimentally added diamond overlays below Y=0 and fixed floating fossils, before those generation changes were reverted.

  5. 1.18Java

    Restored deeper fossil generation and restricted diamond-bearing fossils to the deepslate region.

  6. 1.18.10Bedrock

    Added diamond-ore overlays to fossils generating below Y=0.

  7. 26.3Java

    Moved fossil configurations with the other configured features into the worldgen/feature registry using inline configuration.

Read the full article on the Minecraft Wiki ↗

SeedLookout in-game verification

Seeds with this fossil

None of our verified seeds has a fossil yet. The facts above come from the Minecraft Wiki and have not been checked in game by us.

Sources

The description, generation rules, variants, loot, mobs and history above are summarised from the Minecraft Wiki article Fossil, retrieved 2026-09-30. Minecraft Wiki text is available under CC BY-NC-SA 3.0. We have not checked these facts in game.

Seed numbers, coordinates and screenshots come from SeedLookout's own in-game verification. About verified seeds