100 Fun Facts About Fossils

The word fossil comes from a Latin word meaning what?

Obtained by digging. In the 1600s a fossil was anything dug out of the ground, coal and salt included; the word narrowed to the remains of ancient life only in the 1730s.

What is the scientific study of fossils called?

Paleontology. As a science it began in the 1790s with a startling proof drawn from fossil skeletons: whole species, the mammoth among them, had vanished for good.

Specimens are sometimes only counted as fossils once they are older than roughly what age?

10,000 years. The line is a convention, and nothing says a fossil must have turned to stone: a mammoth preserved in ice counts, while younger remains are called subfossils.

About how old are the oldest widely accepted fossils on Earth?

3.5 billion years. Earth itself is about 4.5 billion years old, so life was under way about a billion years after the planet formed, and older chemical traces hint that it began earlier still.

Which technique, developed in the early 20th century, gives rocks an absolute age?

Radiometric dating. Radioactive elements decay at fixed, known rates, so the ratio of an element to its decay products works as a clock; it stretched Earth's age from Kelvin's 20 to 400 million years to billions.

The stone logs of Petrified Forest National Park, more than 200 million years old, lie in which US state?

Arizona. Visitors who pocket a piece often mail it back with a letter of apology, some of them fearing a curse; rangers cannot tell where each rock came from, so it joins a 'conscience pile'.

What is the technical name for fossilized feces?

Coprolites. The name is Greek for 'dung stone', and a broken one can still hold the fish scales and bones of a meal eaten millions of years ago.

Footprints, burrows and droppings are classed as what kind of fossil?

Trace fossils. They record what an animal did, not what it looked like, and some trails and burrows are older than any body fossil of a creature that could have made them.

Which mythical creature may have been inspired by Protoceratops skulls, according to Adrienne Mayor?

The griffin. Mayor suggested Scythian gold miners met the beaked, four-legged skeletons in Central Asia; critics reply that the fossils lie hundreds of kilometres from any gold and that griffin art has an older history of its own.

What were the tongue stones, or glossopetra, described by Pliny the Elder?

Fossil shark teeth. Pliny thought they dropped from the sky, perhaps from the moon, and for centuries afterwards nobles wore them as charms against snakebite and poison.

Pliny the Elder named which coiled fossils after the ram's horns of an Egyptian god?

Ammonites. The god was Ammon, shown with a ram's horns; in English folklore the same fossils were snakes turned to stone, and dealers carved heads on them to help them sell.

Toadstones, once worn in rings as a charm against poison, were really the fossil teeth of what?

An extinct fish. Its button-shaped teeth were thought to grow in the heads of living toads, and a toadstone ring was supposed to turn warm on the finger when poison was near.

The 3.2-million-year-old fossil skeleton nicknamed Lucy was found in 1974 in which country?

Ethiopia. 'Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds' was playing in camp the night she was found, which gave her the name; her skeleton showed that our ancestors walked upright before their brains grew big.

In traditional Chinese medicine, fossil mammal remains have long been sold under what name?

Dragon bones. Fossil hunters learned to search Chinese pharmacies for them, a trick that led to Peking Man, and in 1899 a scholar noticed that some carried ancient Chinese writing.

Which petrified plant, found in dry northern China, led the Song scholar Shen Kuo to suggest that climates change?

Bamboo. It could not grow in so dry a place in his own day, so he suggested the climate had once been different; he also read seashells in mountain rock as the mark of a vanished shoreline.

Fossil elephant skulls may have inspired which creatures of Greek myth?

The Cyclopes. The opening for the trunk sits in the middle of the skull like one giant eye socket; the link remains a conjecture.

In Danish folklore, fossil sea urchins were kept in the home as protective charms under what name?

Thunderstones. Danes believed they fell from the heavens in storms and kept them on a shelf to protect the house from lightning, and even to stop the milk turning sour.

Which Danish anatomist argued in the 1660s that fossils were once living things, and worked out how rock layers form?

Nicholas Steno. Within a few years of that work he gave up science altogether, became a Catholic priest and ended his life as a bishop.

Which English canal engineer formulated the principle of faunal succession?

William Smith. He used the idea to draw his great 1815 geological map of England and Wales, went to debtors' prison four years later, and only late in life received the Geological Society's highest honour.

Which French naturalist concluded most fossils were extinct species and championed catastrophism?

Georges Cuvier. In 1796 he showed that mammoth bones belonged to no living elephant, and he became famous for rebuilding whole vanished animals from a handful of bones.

Which British fossil hunter unearthed an ichthyosaur as a child and later the first complete plesiosaur?

Mary Anning. The plesiosaur looked so odd that the leading anatomist in Paris took it for a fake, and the Geological Society met to discuss it without inviting her.

When Darwin wrote On the Origin of Species, the oldest known animal fossils dated to which period?

Cambrian. Darwin called the lack of older fossils one of the gravest difficulties for his theory and hoped they would turn up; they since have, in far older rocks.

The Ediacara biota, about 575 million years old, are among the earliest known fossils of what?

Large, complex organisms. Geologist Reg Sprigg noticed the soft-bodied imprints in 1946 while inspecting old mines, reportedly over lunch, and they showed that complex life was older than the first animals with shells.

Which English geologist first gave a scientific account of fossil droppings?

William Buckland. He made his case by comparing the stones with the dung of living hyenas, and he also wrote the first full account of a dinosaur, Megalosaurus.

Dating rocks by the fossils embedded in them is called what?

Biostratigraphy. Each stretch of time has its own cast of species, so the same distinctive fossil found in two distant cliffs shows that their rocks are the same age.

Which pair of scientists proposed the theory of punctuated equilibrium in 1972?

Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge. Eldredge had found that trilobite eyes stayed the same for millions of years and then changed abruptly, and the pair argued that such fits and starts are how species usually evolve.

Absolute dating of fossil-bearing rock usually relies on which kind of layer?

Volcanic ash. The beds that hold fossils usually cannot be dated directly, so geologists date ash layers above and below and bracket the fossil's age between them.

Nearly all fossils are found in which kind of rock?

Sedimentary. Mud and sand settling over a body shield it from scavengers and decay, whereas the heat and pressure that make igneous and most metamorphic rock destroy any remains.

Fossil sites with exceptional preservation are known by what German term?

Lagerstätten. The German word means a storage place; the animals were usually buried fast in mud with no oxygen, so bacteria never got to work and even eyes and guts survived.

Which famous fossil site is in the Canadian Rockies?

Burgess Shale. Charles Walcott, head of the Smithsonian, found it in 1909 and kept coming back with his wife and children until he had quarried more than 65,000 specimens.

Which fossilization process fills the pores of buried wood or bone with material deposited by groundwater?

Permineralization. It is how wood turns to stone: minerals settle in every empty space and copy detail as fine as the wall of a single plant cell.

A fossil whose aragonite has turned to calcite but kept its original compounds is called what?

Recrystallized. Aragonite, the mineral of pearls and many shells, is the same compound as calcite in a different crystal form, and over geological time it slowly reverts to the commoner one.

Pyritization preserves organisms using which two elements?

Sulfur and iron. Rotting tissue gives off sulfide that reacts with iron dissolved in the water around it, coating or replacing the remains with pyrite, the brassy mineral known as fool's gold.

Which feathered fossil, found in a German limestone quarry in 1861, has the teeth and bony tail of a reptile?

Archaeopteryx. With a bird's feathers and wings but teeth, clawed fingers and a long bony tail, it became the classic link between dinosaurs and birds, and is now counted as a small feathered dinosaur itself.

Silicification can turn a buried bone or shell into which mineral?

Opal. Silica-laden water soaks into the remains and hardens; at Lightning Ridge, gem miners have dug up dinosaur bones that turned to precious opal.

The organism-shaped hole left in rock after the remains dissolve is called what?

An external mold. If mud later fills the hollow and hardens, the filling takes on the exact outer shape of a shell or bone that itself vanished long ago.

What is the natural stone copy of the inside of a skull, formed when mud fills the braincase, called?

An endocast. The hardened filling records the shape of a brain that rotted away long ago, which is how the brains of dinosaurs and early humans are measured.

Which fish, known only from fossils and thought extinct for 66 million years, was caught alive off South Africa in 1938?

Coelacanth. A museum curator spotted the strange fish in a local fisherman's catch that December, and the living genus, Latimeria, now carries her name.

The La Brea Tar Pits, which trapped Ice Age mammoths and sabre-toothed cats, lie in the middle of which US city?

Los Angeles. One animal stuck in the asphalt drew in packs of hunters that got stuck too, which is why dire wolves and sabre-toothed cats are the commonest large mammals in the pits.

In 2005 Mary Schweitzer reported soft, stretchy tissue inside a bone of which dinosaur?

Tyrannosaurus rex. The 68-million-year-old leg bone was broken only because it was too heavy for the helicopter; inside were transparent, flexible strands that looked like blood vessels.

What makes a good index fossil?

Common, widespread and short-lived. A species that lived everywhere but only briefly pins a rock layer to one narrow slice of time, and it has to be plentiful or nobody would find it in both places.

England's White Cliffs of Dover are built mostly from the fossil shells of what?

Plankton. The chalk is a mass of coccoliths, tiny plates that once armoured single-celled algae; these floated near the surface and sank to the seabed over millions of years.

Fossil resin is better known by what everyday name?

Amber. The Greeks called it elektron, and because a rubbed piece picks up a static charge, that word later gave us 'electricity'.

What are the organisms trapped inside fossil resin called?

Inclusions. One lump of fossil resin bought at a market in Myanmar, already shaped for jewellery, turned out in 2016 to hold the feathered tail of a small dinosaur.

A fossil eroded out of its original rock and buried again in younger layers is called what?

Reworked. Because it turns up in rock millions of years younger than itself, such a stray can make a long-dead species seem to live on; the nickname for one is a zombie taxon.

Layered structures built by cyanobacteria in shallow water are called what?

Stromatolites. The microbes that built them also released the oxygen that first made Earth's air breathable, and living ones still grow on the shore at Shark Bay.

Shark Bay, where living microbial reefs like those of the early Earth still grow, is in which country?

Australia. The water there is up to twice as salty as the open ocean, which keeps out the grazing animals thought to have cleared such reefs from most other seas.

The fern-like black patterns called dendrites, common on slabs of limestone, are made of what?

Mineral crystals. Water carrying manganese seeps along cracks in the rock and leaves branching deposits; lookalikes of this kind, made by geology and not by life, are called pseudofossils.

Roy Chapman Andrews's 1923 Gobi Desert expedition found the first fossils recognised as what?

Dinosaur eggs. A small dinosaur found lying on one nest was named Oviraptor, 'egg seizer'; later finds showed it was a parent sitting on its own eggs, like a brooding bird.

Which hardy mineral forms the 4.1-billion-year-old crystals whose trapped carbon may be the oldest trace of life?

Zircon. The grains, from the Jack Hills, are the oldest pieces of Earth yet found; carbon sealed inside one has the light signature that living things leave, though the reading is disputed.

Which gemstone, worn as mourning jewellery by Queen Victoria, is the fossilised wood of ancient trees?

Jet is wood from trees like the Chilean pine, crushed and altered over millions of years. The most famous comes from Whitby on the English coast, where the Victorian tradition carried on until after the Second World War.

Which US president asked Lewis and Clark to look out for living examples of a giant clawed fossil beast?

Thomas Jefferson thought the bones came from a great cat more than three times the size of a lion. They belonged to a giant ground sloth, later named Megalonyx jeffersonii in his honour.

Fossils of the tree Glossopteris were found with the bodies of which explorer's doomed Antarctic party in 1912?

Robert Scott and his men kept their rock samples with them to the very end. The fossils showed that Antarctica was once forested and joined to other continents.

The name thagomizer, coined in a 1982 Far Side cartoon, now describes the tail spikes of which dinosaur?

Stegosaurus carried two pairs of the spikes, and the joke name stuck after a scientist used it at a conference in 1993. In the cartoon, a caveman lecturer names them after an unlucky colleague.

Pakicetus, a wolf-like animal of Pakistan 48 million years ago, is regarded as the most primitive known what?

Whale ancestors walked on four legs, and Pakicetus hunted at the water's edge like a wolf. The closest living relatives of its descendants on land are hippos.

Which American tycoon paid for plaster casts of the Diplodocus skeleton Dippy to be sent to museums worldwide?

Andrew Carnegie sent casts to capitals from Berlin to Mexico City, making Dippy the most-viewed dinosaur skeleton in the world. London's copy stood in the Natural History Museum from 1905 until 2017.

Sue, one of the largest predatory dinosaur skeletons ever found, was bought in 1997 by a museum in which city?

Chicago's Field Museum paid $8.3 million, then the highest price ever paid for a fossil. Sue was only found because a flat tyre delayed the team's departure in 1990.

Which supposed missing link, announced in 1912, was later exposed as a human skull with an orangutan's jaw?

Piltdown Man fooled scientists for 41 years; the teeth in the jaw had been filed down to look human. A 2016 study pinned the forgery on its finder, the amateur collector Charles Dawson.

Which extinct human relatives are named after a German valley where their bones were found in 1856?

Neanderthals take their name from the Neander Valley, where a local schoolteacher saw that the bones were not from a modern human. The find came three years before Darwin published his theory.

Which living animals do scientists now class as surviving dinosaurs, a link T. H. Huxley proposed in the 1860s?

Birds evolved from two-legged theropods, which makes them the only dinosaurs alive now. More than thirty other dinosaur species have been found with feathers preserved.

Which Renaissance artist noted that fossil seashells on mountains were the remains of real sea creatures?

Leonardo reasoned that the mountains had once been sea beds, slowly lifted over time. The notebook, the Codex Leicester, was bought by Bill Gates in 1994 for more than $30 million.

Which black rock is the compressed remains of swamp forests that covered the tropics some 300 million years ago?

Coal begins as peat, then is squeezed and heated by deep burial over millions of years. So much formed in one stretch of time that it was named the Carboniferous, meaning coal-bearing.

Which extinct sea arthropods, found as fossils worldwide, are often preserved curled up like a modern pill bug?

Trilobites rolled up for protection, a habit seen in fossils more than 510 million years old. The last of them vanished about 252 million years ago, in the largest mass extinction of all.

Glyptodon, a two-tonne Ice Age animal of South America with a domed bony shell, belonged to which group?

Armadillos once came in giant form: the shell of Glyptodon was built from hundreds of interlocking bony plates. It died out only around 11,000 years ago.

Which famous dinosaur name, long dismissed as a duplicate of Apatosaurus, was revived by a major study in 2015?

Brontosaurus, meaning thunder lizard, was named in 1879 and folded into its close relative in 1903. The 2015 study of the whole family found enough differences to split the two again.

Which blue-blooded sea animal, closer to spiders than to crustaceans, resembles fossils 445 million years old?

Horseshoe crab blood is blue because it carries oxygen with copper, and it is collected to make a test for dangerous bacterial toxins. The animals have changed little in 250 million years.

Meganeura, an insect of 300 million years ago with a wingspan of about 70 centimetres, looked like a giant what?

Dragonfly lookalikes such as Meganeura were among the largest flying insects ever, about five times the length of the biggest modern ones. Richer oxygen in the air is one debated explanation.

Mesosaurus fossils, found only in southern Africa and South America, became key evidence for which theory?

Continental drift explained how one small, slow-swimming reptile came to lie on both sides of the Atlantic: the two continents were joined when it lived, about 275 million years ago.

The Fighting Dinosaurs fossil, found in Mongolia in 1971, shows a Protoceratops locked in combat with which predator?

Velociraptor has one hand trapped in the plant-eater's jaws while the other claws at its skull. The pair were probably buried alive together by a collapsing dune or a sandstorm.

Which English anatomist coined the word dinosaur and campaigned for London's Natural History Museum?

Richard Owen built the name from Greek words for terrible lizard, basing the group on just three animals from southern England. His statue in the museum made way for one of Darwin in 2009.

The Laetoli footprints, proof that human relatives walked upright 3.7 million years ago, are in which country?

Tanzania's Laetoli tracks were found by Mary Leakey's team in 1976. About 70 prints run for 27 metres, left by three individuals, one treading in another's steps.

Dinosaur Provincial Park, whose badlands have yielded dozens of dinosaur species, lies in which Canadian province?

Alberta's park has sent more than 500 specimens to museums around the globe. Its badlands became a World Heritage Site in 1979.

Which tree, the last living species of an order more than 290 million years old, survived the Hiroshima atomic bomb?

Ginkgo trees less than two kilometres from the Hiroshima blast were among the few living things to survive it. Fossils much like the living tree go back about 170 million years.

Bones of a metre-tall human species nicknamed the Hobbit were found in 2003 on the island of Flores in which country?

Indonesia's Hobbit, Homo floresiensis, stood about 1.1 metres tall. The species lived on Flores until modern humans arrived some 50,000 years ago.

Patagotitan, one of the largest dinosaurs known, was found after a farm labourer spotted a huge bone in which country?

Argentina's Patagotitan is known from at least six animals found on one ranch, and is named after the family who own it. David Attenborough followed the excavation for a BBC film.

Which giant predatory dinosaur's first fossils, found in Egypt, were destroyed when bombs hit a Munich museum in 1944?

Spinosaurus was lost in a British air raid; its bones had not been moved to safety, partly because of a feud with the museum's Nazi director. A new partial skeleton, found in Morocco, was described in 2014.

Hadrosaurus, which in 1868 became the first dinosaur skeleton ever mounted for display, was unearthed in which US state?

New Jersey's Hadrosaurus was pulled from a marl pit in Haddonfield in 1858, years before the great bone rushes of the West. It is the official state dinosaur.

The world's first dinosaur sculptures, unveiled in 1854, stand in a London park named after which building?

Crystal Palace Park's sculptor, Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, launched the models with a dinner party seated inside a hollow Iguanodon on New Year's Eve 1853.

Which era of Earth's history, nicknamed the Age of Reptiles, spans the Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous periods?

Mesozoic time ran from about 252 to 66 million years ago. The nickname was coined by Gideon Mantell, the English doctor who discovered Iguanodon.

Which dinosaur from the quarries of Oxfordshire became, in 1824, the first ever to be given a scientific name?

Megalosaurus means great lizard, and its first students pictured a four-legged reptile 20 metres long. It was really a two-legged hunter about six metres long.

Which giant sea reptile is named after the river at the Dutch city of Maastricht, where its skull was found?

Mosasaurus means lizard of the Meuse. One skull grew so famous that French revolutionary troops carried it off as loot after besieging the city in 1794.

Polished pebbles found with some dinosaur skeletons, swallowed in life to help grind food, are called what?

Gastroliths appear to have ground up tough plants for the long-necked sauropods. Those found with dinosaurs can weigh several kilograms, and a true one is rounded on every edge.

Which geological period ended with the Great Dying, the most severe extinction in the whole fossil record?

Permian seas lost about 81% of their species, and 70% of land vertebrate species vanished with them. The disaster also closed the whole Paleozoic era.

Robert Plot, who published the first picture of a dinosaur bone in the 1670s, finally decided it came from what?

A giant human was his second idea, after he ruled out an elephant brought over by the Romans. The bone is now thought to be the thigh of a large meat-eating dinosaur.

The curved fossil shells known as devil's toenails, from the genus Gryphaea, belonged to which kind of sea animal?

Oysters of the genus Gryphaea lay on soft sea floors with the big curved shell sunk in the mud and a small flat one on top. They flourished in early Jurassic seas and turn up almost worldwide.

Which microscopic structures, preserved in fossil feathers and skin, let scientists infer the colours of some dinosaurs?

Melanosomes come in different shapes for different colours, so their outlines can be read like a paint chart. One feathered dinosaur, Anchiornis, turned out black, white and grey with a reddish crest.

Which Yale professor, who named Allosaurus, fought Edward Drinker Cope in the fossil feud called the Bone Wars?

Othniel Charles Marsh and his rival stooped to bribery, theft and smashing bones to outdo each other. Both men ended up ruined, but between them they named well over a hundred new dinosaur species.

Which rare metal, enriched in one thin band of rock worldwide, pointed the Alvarez team to a dinosaur-killing asteroid?

Iridium is scarce in Earth's crust but far richer in asteroids, and that band holds many times the normal amount. The team behind the find, announced in 1980, was led by a Nobel prize-winning physicist and his geologist son.

The fossils called St Cuthbert's beads, once strung as rosaries on Lindisfarne, are pieces of which sea animals?

Sea lilies, or crinoids, grew on jointed stalks, and the beads are discs from those stalks. A thread passes neatly through the hole in the middle of each one.

Which tree was described from fossils in 1941 and thought long extinct, until living groves were found in central China?

Dawn redwood was matched to the fossils in 1946, and within two years its seeds were being shipped to tree collections around the world.

Which fossil fish, found on Ellesmere Island in 2004, is famed as a link between fish and four-legged animals?

Tiktaalik had the scales and gills of a fish but a flat, crocodile-like skull and the earliest known neck. Its finders spent five years searching Arctic rocks before they struck lucky.

Woolly mammoths survived until about 4,000 years ago, when Egypt's pyramids already stood, on which Arctic island?

Wrangel Island, off north-east Siberia, kept a small population going for thousands of years after the great herds had gone. By then cities stood in Egypt and Mesopotamia.

Which spiny worm-like sea creature, over 500 million years old, was first reconstructed upside down and back to front?

Hallucigenia was drawn walking on its spines, with its legs taken for tentacles waving on its back. The name reflects how dreamlike the animal looked to the scientist who described it in 1977.

What name did Soviet scientist Ivan Efremov give in 1940 to the study of how dead organisms decay and become fossils?

Taphonomy comes from the Greek for burial and law. It splits a dead organism's story into two phases: what happens between death and burial, and what happens after.

Which disused quarry near Frankfurt preserves 47-million-year-old animals complete with fur and feathers?

Messel Pit was nearly turned into a landfill before local protests saved it, and it became a World Heritage Site in 1995. It had been mined for fuel since 1859.

Which soft-bodied sea creature, found only in the Mazon Creek beds, is the official state fossil of Illinois?

Tully monster fossils were first found in 1955 by the amateur collector Francis Tully, and its place in the tree of life has been argued over ever since. It had stalked eyes and a long snout.

What name is given to a group that vanishes from the fossil record, then reappears millions of years later?

Lazarus taxon recalls the man raised from the dead in the Gospel of John. Such a gap usually means the group grew too rare to leave fossils, not that it ever died out.

Which tiny, common fossils stayed a mystery until the eel-like animal they came from was found in the 1980s?

Conodonts are tooth-like pieces up to five millimetres long, first described in 1856. Their owner turned out to be a soft-bodied, jawless swimmer with large eyes.

The Rhynie chert, a 400-million-year-old deposit preserving early land plants in fine detail, lies in which country?

Scotland's Rhynie chert, near a village in Aberdeenshire, holds primitive plants with no true leaves, along with fungi, lichens and tiny arthropods. The plants grew beside hot springs.

Titanoboa, a 13-metre snake that lived about 60 million years ago, was found in a mine in which country?

Colombia's Cerrejón mine has yielded 186 fossils of the snake, which may have weighed more than a tonne. It was hailed in 2009 as the largest snake ever found.