Crossword-Solution: FOSSIL 6 letters, 116 clues 🏆 scrabble score: 9

Rich in natural resources, Australia is a major exporter of agricultural products, minerals, metals, and fossil fuels.

The pattern here, as with other hackish grammatical quirks, is generalization of an inflectional rule that in English is either an import or a fossil (such as the Hebrew plural ending `-im', or the Anglo-Saxon plural suffix `-en') to cases where it isn't normally considered to apply.

Adjusting his spectacles he looked for a moment at the placard and then, turning away, strolled off muttering to himself: “Most remarkable—most remarkable!” “Hi, old fossil,” cried the man who had first called on him for assistance, “did je think we wanted of you to read the bloomin’ notis to yourself? Come back here and read it out loud, you old barnacle.” The old man stopped and, turning back, said: “Oh, yes, my dear sir, a thousand pardons.

How immense it looked in that little room! The thing was tremendous, overpowering--the tooth of a gigantic fossil, golden and dazzling.

Folded behind were dragon forms and clouds of flying reptiles: still underneath were fishy beings of lower development; and so on, till the lifetime scenes of the fossil confronting him were a present and modern condition of things.