fossilize

Verb

fossilize (third-person singular simple present fossilizes, present participle fossilizing, simple past and past participle fossilized)

1. (transitive) To make into a fossil.
   • Most of the booths had been scooped clean by the scalpel-sharp corner of the glacier in the crash. Three remained. Two of them were punctured and, inside, the once-human occupants had been fossilized into the walls by centuries upon centuries of patient ice.1989, Grant Naylor, Red Dwarf: Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers
2. (intransitive) To become a fossil.

   Synonyms:

   fossilate, fossilify

3. (broadly, figuratively, intransitive) To become inflexible or outmoded.
   • I was getting fossilised myself, but of late my stock of ideas has been very much enlarged.1886 October – 1887 January, H[enry] Rider Haggard, She: A History of Adventure, London: Longmans, Green, and Co., published 1887, →OCLC
4. (broadly, figuratively, transitive) To make antiquated, rigid, or fixed; to deaden.
   • Ten layers of birthdays on a woman's head / Are apt to fossilize her girlish mirth.1856, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, “Eighth Book”, in Aurora Leigh, London: Chapman and Hall, […], published 1857, →OCLC
   • I'll meet you again
     Blanketed in soil
     Fossilized in photographs2013, Days N' Daze, “Blue Jays”, in Rogue Taxidermy