50 Fun Facts About Paleontology

Which US president, who named the fossil ground sloth Megalonyx, hoped Lewis and Clark would find living mastodons?

Thomas Jefferson first took the giant-clawed Megalonyx for an enormous lion-like cat when he studied its bones in the 1790s. One species of the sloth now carries his name.

Which Ice Age giant survived on Wrangel Island until about 4,000 years ago, after Egypt's Great Pyramid was built?

The woolly mammoth held on at Wrangel Island, in the Arctic Ocean, until around 2000 BCE. Those last animals were smaller than mainland herds but not true island dwarfs.

Which dinosaur's tail spikes are called a thagomizer, a name invented as a joke in a Far Side cartoon?

Stegosaurus carried four tail spikes, and cartoonist Gary Larson gave them a name in a 1982 strip. Scientists liked the joke enough that the word crept into real research.

Which fossil hunter from Lyme Regis helped unearth the first correctly identified ichthyosaur skeleton at age twelve?

Mary Anning made her living selling fossils from the Dorset cliffs, and a king of Saxony bought an ichthyosaur skeleton from her shop in 1844.

Which fish, thought to have died out with the dinosaurs, turned up alive in a fisherman's catch off South Africa?

The coelacanth was known only from fossils until museum curator Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer spotted one in a 1938 catch. Its genus, Latimeria, is named after her.

Which giant extinct shark left behind fossil teeth over 18 centimetres long but almost no skeleton?

Megalodon had a skeleton of cartilage rather than bone, so it rarely fossilized. Its size has to be estimated from teeth and a few vertebrae.

Which group of long-necked marine reptiles is the Loch Ness Monster popularly imagined to be a surviving member of?

Plesiosaurs could not have raised their heads swan-style above the water the way the monster is drawn, because their neck bones would not bend that far.

Which US city surrounds the La Brea Tar Pits, where dire wolves and saber-toothed cats were trapped in asphalt?

Los Angeles grew up around the pits, and in 2006 crews digging a parking garage for the county art museum next door struck 16 new fossil deposits.

Which famous dinosaur name was dismissed for most of the 20th century as a mere synonym of Apatosaurus?

Brontosaurus, meaning thunder lizard, was folded into Apatosaurus in 1903 because that name had been published first. A 2015 study argued the two are distinct after all, though not everyone agrees.

The word fossil comes from the Latin fossilis, which carries which literal meaning?

Dug up is the literal sense, and in the 1600s a fossil was anything taken from the ground, coal and salt included. The meaning narrowed to ancient plant and animal remains in the 1730s.

Which golden gemstone, traded from the Baltic coast since Roman times, can hold insects trapped millions of years ago?

Amber is fossilized tree resin, and it has trapped far more than insects: spider webs, frogs, flowers and feathers have all turned up inside.

Which radioactive isotope cannot date dinosaur bones because it only works on remains up to about 50,000 years old?

Carbon-14 has a half-life of about 5,730 years, so too little is left to measure after roughly 50,000. Rocks from the age of dinosaurs are dated with far slower-decaying elements.

In which African country was Lucy, an Australopithecus skeleton named after a Beatles song, discovered?

Ethiopia's Hadar site gave up about 40% of her skeleton, some 3.2 million years old. The team chose the name that night while a Beatles tape played over and over in camp.

Which feathered fossil from Bavaria's Solnhofen limestone, with teeth and a long bony tail, links dinosaurs to birds?

Archaeopteryx looked so much like a small dinosaur that one specimen was first filed as Compsognathus by the collector who owned it.

The Chicxulub crater, left by the asteroid blamed for wiping out the dinosaurs, lies buried beneath which peninsula?

The Yucatán crater stayed hidden until geophysicists hunting for oil mapped it in the late 1970s. Their employer, Mexico's state oil company, first put the buried ring down to volcanic activity.

Which naturalist unearthed giant ground sloth fossils in South America years before he proposed natural selection?

Charles Darwin shipped the bones home from the Beagle voyage, and they were shown to Britain's leading scientists before he got back, making his reputation while he was still at sea.

Which English anatomist coined the word Dinosauria and drove the founding of London's Natural History Museum?

Richard Owen built the name from the Greek for terrible lizard, though he meant terrible in the sense of fearfully great rather than frightening.

Which extinct sea creatures thrived for about 270 million years before vanishing in the end-Permian mass extinction?

Trilobites saw the world through lenses of clear calcite crystal, a feature of even the earliest species. Only a handful of kinds were left when the last ones died out.

Which dinosaur, shown as human-sized in the Jurassic Park films, was really about the size of a turkey?

Velociraptor was also feathered: a row of quill knobs on one fossil forearm bone shows where large wing-like feathers were anchored.

Which geological era, bracketed by two mass extinctions, is commonly known as the Age of the Dinosaurs?

The Mesozoic literally means middle life: it is the second of the three eras since complex animals evolved, and a hot greenhouse climate lasted through most of it.

Which Philadelphia fossil hunter fought the Bone Wars against Yale's Othniel Charles Marsh until both men were ruined?

Edward Drinker Cope once put the head of the long-necked Elasmosaurus on the tip of its tail, then tried to buy up every copy of the journal that printed his mistake.

Which Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton, named after the collector who found it in South Dakota, is in Chicago's Field Museum?

Sue is named after Sue Hendrickson, who went to look at some unexplored cliffs while the rest of her crew drove into town to repair a truck.

Which rare metal in a worldwide layer of clay led the Alvarez team to blame an asteroid for killing the dinosaurs?

Iridium turned up at hundreds of times its normal level in that layer, a clue spotted in 1980 by a Nobel-winning physicist working with his geologist son.

What name did geologist William Buckland coin for the fossilized dung that reveals what ancient animals ate?

Coprolites were taken for odd stones until Buckland studied them, and he suspected some were stained black by ink from swallowed belemnites.

In which country did fossil hunters in the 1990s find the first non-bird dinosaur known to have had feathers?

China's Sinosauropteryx wore a coat of simple filaments, and preserved pigment structures show its tail was banded in light and dark.

In which desert did Roy Chapman Andrews's 1920s expeditions find the first known nests of dinosaur eggs?

The Gobi nests lay at a site Andrews named the Flaming Cliffs, and for seven decades the eggs were credited to the wrong dinosaur.

Which group of two-legged dinosaurs includes both Tyrannosaurus and, through their descendants, every living bird?

Theropods range from giants like Giganotosaurus down to the bee hummingbird, which at under two grams is the smallest living dinosaur.

Which geological period is famous for an explosion in which most major animal groups first appear in the fossil record?

The Cambrian burst of new body plans took between 13 and 25 million years, so it was sudden only by geological standards.

Which US state is home to Petrified Forest National Park, where Triassic logs turned to solid stone?

Arizona's logs were buried under sediment full of volcanic ash, and groundwater carried dissolved silica into the wood, where quartz crystals slowly replaced it.

Which French naturalist, called the founding father of paleontology, convinced science that species can go extinct?

Georges Cuvier showed that elephant-like bones from North America belonged to a vanished animal, which he later named the mastodon.

Which dinosaur, described by William Buckland from Oxfordshire bones, was the first to receive a scientific name?

Megalosaurus narrowly escaped a ruder label: an early engraving of one thigh-bone fragment was captioned Scrotum humanum, a name that in principle had priority.

Which industrialist paid for casts of the Diplodocus skeleton Dippy to be given to museums around the world?

Andrew Carnegie sent a cast to London after Britain's king admired a sketch of the bones at the tycoon's Scottish castle.

Which supposed missing link turned out to be a human skull with an orangutan's jaw?

Piltdown Man fooled much of British science for four decades, until tests in 1953 exposed the filed-down teeth and mismatched bones as a forgery.

Which group of reptiles, often wrongly called dinosaurs, were the first vertebrates to evolve powered flight?

Pterosaurs took to the air long before birds or bats, and wing membranes preserved in their embryos suggest they could fly soon after hatching.

Which sail-backed predator, often mistaken for a dinosaur, is more closely related to mammals than to living reptiles?

Dimetrodon had already been extinct for some 40 million years by the time the first dinosaurs appeared.

Which giant predatory dinosaur's original bones, found in Egypt, were destroyed in a World War II bombing of Munich?

Spinosaurus lost its first skeleton in 1944 after the museum's director, at odds with Ernst Stromer, who had named the animal, would not have the bones moved to safety.

Which geological period, the last to have non-bird dinosaurs, takes its name from the Latin word for chalk?

The Cretaceous is named for the thick chalk laid down in its later half, including the beds that form the white cliffs of Dover.

Footprints, burrows and feeding marks belong to which category of fossil, studied by specialists called ichnologists?

Trace fossils record what an animal did rather than what it looked like, and trackways let researchers measure how it moved.

Which giant marine reptile was first known from skulls found in a chalk quarry near the Dutch city of Maastricht?

Mosasaurus is named after the Meuse River near the quarry, and one skull found in 1778 was nicknamed the great animal of Maastricht.

Which fossil bed in the Canadian Rockies, discovered by Charles Walcott, is famous for preserving animals' soft parts?

The Burgess Shale is one of the earliest fossil beds to keep imprints of soft tissue, and its black rock crops out high in Yoho National Park.

Which fossil fish with a neck and wrist joints, found on Ellesmere Island, shows how vertebrates moved onto land?

Tiktaalik takes its name from an Inuktitut word for a large freshwater fish. Its finders had been searching the Arctic island since 2000 before the first bones turned up in 2004.

Which layered rock mounds, built up by mats of cyanobacteria, have living examples in Shark Bay, Western Australia?

Stromatolites preserve some of the most ancient life on Earth, and they were at their most abundant about 1.25 billion years ago, long before animals appeared.

Vast volcanic eruptions in which region are blamed for the Great Dying, the worst mass extinction in the fossil record?

Siberia's lava fields, known as the Siberian Traps, erupted as the Permian ended, and they are the leading suspect even though the full cause is still debated.

Which sickle-clawed predator, described by John Ostrom in the 1960s, set off the so-called dinosaur renaissance?

Deinonychus means terrible claw, after the large curved talon on each second toe, and Ostrom's study reopened the question of whether dinosaurs were warm-blooded.

Which duck-billed dinosaur, found in Montana beside nests of babies, was given a name meaning good mother lizard?

Maiasaura was named by Jack Horner and Bob Makela, who found 15 babies in one nest and concluded that the adults looked after their young.

Which branch of paleontology, named from the Greek for burial, studies how dead organisms decay and become fossils?

Taphonomy splits a fossil's story into two phases: what happens between death and burial, and what happens once the remains are underground.

Which part of the skeleton did Harry Seeley use to split dinosaurs into two groups, Saurischia and Ornithischia?

Hips with a backward-pointing pubis bone, as in birds, gave Ornithischia its name, yet birds themselves descend from the other, lizard-hipped group.

Which US state yielded Hadrosaurus, whose bones became the first mounted dinosaur skeleton in the world?

New Jersey's find came from a marl pit in Haddonfield, and when the skeleton went on show in Philadelphia in 1868 it wore a skull sculpted from plaster.

Which English canal surveyor used the fossils in each rock layer to draw the first nationwide geological map?

William Smith earned the nickname Strata, yet he was overlooked by the scientific establishment and spent time in debtors' prison.

Which Sussex doctor named Iguanodon after seeing how closely its fossil teeth matched those of an iguana?

Gideon Mantell's attempts to reconstruct the animal began the scientific study of dinosaurs, though he struggled to convince his peers how old the bones really were.