What kind of stone is the Temple Mount made of? Hopefully not a fossil bearing kind 
OTTOMH
I think the definition of life in Jewish law has changed as well. A drowning victim pulled to land used to be considered dead. Then, CPR and such came around. We can restart a heart that stops beating etc. While most Jews say it is permissible to harvest organs from an organ donor, not everybody agrees.
This is one of the contradictions in the Torah for me. We are taught that God made only one man and one woman so that nobody could say ‘I am better than you because of my ancestors’. Makes sense. But, then we have the curse of Ham. We have the descendants of the kohain and levites given special priviliges because of their ancestors not worshipping the golden calf. If the Talmud says (and it does) ‘The son does not bear the guilt for the crimes of his father’ how does it make any sense to reward people for something their ancestors did?
ETA
AIUI ritual impurity applies to human remains only, Otherwise, all kohainim would need to be vegetarians.
Or there’s an exception for kosher meat only, and touching a dead non-kosher animal would cause impurity?
Google says it’s limestone, which usually contains fossils of sea creatures. Are ammonites kosher?
Ritual impurity is very complex, and very common. If you have been in a house that has the wrong kind of mold on the wall, you are ritually impure. If you are close to a person with certain diseases, you are ritually impure. If a woman menstruates she is ritually impure. If a man ejaculates outside a woman’s vagina he is ritually impure. (Yes, wet dreams count.) If a woman gives birth, she is ritually impure. If anyone comes in contact with a dead human body, they are ritually impure. That’s just off the top of my head. There are also a variety of ways to regain ritual purity, of which the most common is to bathe (dunk in a mikvah) and wait until the next day.
I think the purity to offer sacrifices may be a special case. And i don’t think it has to do with dead bodies. But i am certainly not an expert in how to resanctify the Temple.
There’s separately an injunction on kohens to avoid dead bodies. They aren’t supposed to be in a room with a dead body unless it’s an immediate relative. Maybe that’s related?
Also carrion. I think any animal that died and was fossilized in pre human times would qualify as carrion.
And there are all kinds of rules about impurity travelling through substances and making those substances impure too. Usually vessels, like pots, which makes sense - if you have a lot holding food and it becomes impure you need to clean the vessel before you put food in it. But I’m not sure how that applies to rocks.
Oh, I am aware that an awful lot of things make some one ritually impure and that almost everybody is ritually impure for one reason or another.
IIRC this also applies to nezhir, like Samson. Nezhir are also not allowed to have contact with grapes.
It’s my understanding that kosher laws stop being relevant for food at the point that it stops being food, which is defined as the point when even a dog won’t eat it. Some have argued that gelatin can be kosher, even if it originated from unclean animals, because it’s so heavily processed that, in the middle of the processing, even a dog won’t eat it. Certainly, fossilized shellfish are past that point.
(but no, fresh ammonites definitely wouldn’t be kosher. The kosher laws for seafood are clear and definitive, without any unknown territory like for land animals.)
Christians (if they paid attention) might be familiar with this from the parable of the Good Samaritan. One of the people who passed by the injured man was a priest, who was on his way to his ritual duties, and who didn’t want to risk impurity.
And the assumption in the law that you can’t really completely clean anything out of a dish makes more sense if you realize that most of their dishes were unglazed pottery at the time those rules were made.
I pointed that out in a thread a long time ago. Somebody insisted I was missing the main point of the story and that one of the people who passed by was a kohain was an uninmportant detail.
It is actually a rather important detail. The kohain’s strict adherence to the law makes him walk far away from a perceived corpse. Had he gotten closer, he would have seen the person was still alive. So, one of the points the story makes is that strict adherence to Jewish law can lead to doing the wrong thing.
Didn’t Samson take honey out of a dead lion? I guess if he was careful not to touch it…
People on StackExchange are speculating about whether receiving a transplant makes you ritually impure, and whether there is any way to regain ritual purity without having the organ removed.
I’ve heard this before, but the explanation given was that the priest was afraid the man would die while he was trying to help him, thus making the priest ritually impure.
Even when it comes to land animals with very clear rules, I’ve seen that some people argue that an animal is only kosher if there’s a specific tradition of it being kosher.
I remember that turkey becoming kosher has a whole story behind it, but I don’t remember the story at the moment.
I think the only extinct animals you could definitively class as kosher or not kosher would be fish (we just need a body plan and skin impressions) and ruminants (although I’m not sure if cud chewing fossilized, would we just have to rely on phylogenetic bracketing?).
If you’re looking for badass extinct and kosher critters to bring back and ranch, I’ll nominate the Irish Elk or the Sivatherium.
For reference, all the story actually says is
No explicit mention of the reasoning of either of them (and I’m not sure what impurity laws would apply to a Levite).
Samson also defeated an entire Philistine army with the jawbone of a donkey, and his superpower was super strength, not telekinesis. (Presumably he also touched some dead Philistines while he was defeating them multiple times in battle).
The rules for Samson seem to have been related to the specific vow his mom made while praying for a child, which was about not cutting his hair or drinking. Not ritual purity specifically.
Eta: but actually, you would think that the honey itself would be impure, in that scenario?
The whole bit with Samson asking a riddle only he could know the answer to felt a bit like a genre shift.
I was more thinking dinosaurs. They’re basically birds, right?
Sadly, the rule for birds boils down to, “if our ancestors ate it, and we have a continuing tradition of eating it, it’s kosher”. So no dinosaurs.
I was going to say, Samson’s super strength plus the riddle but gives very Greek vibes. And that does seem to be a theory: that the story’s contents were in fact inspired by the Philistine invaders’ own culture.
For context, the Philistines (Plishtim in the source material), are often identified with the Peleshet of Egyptian sources, who were one of the Sea Peoples that invaded the region immediately before the Late Bronze Age Collapse, and the leading theory on their origin is that they were Mycenaeans from Greece.
That would go a long way towards explaining Samson’s Herculean vibes.
The same law would apply to a levite, and Jesus’ audience wouldn’t have needed to be told that Kohens and Levites avoid dead bodies.
Except for the turkey! 
I really do need to look up the story of how the turkey became Kosher again, it really was interesting.