the.com/paleontology
detective work where the suspect died 100 million years ago and left only bones.
means The scientific study of life from the distant past, reconstructed from fossils — bones, shells, footprints, and other traces left in rock.
from Built from Greek pieces in the early 19th century: palaios 'ancient' + onta 'beings, existing things' (from the verb 'to be') + -logia 'study of.' So at root it means 'the study of ancient beings' — a name coined as naturalists realized the strange bones in the rock weren't dragons or giants but vanished forms of life with a history of their own.
- name origin
- Greek for study of ancient beings
- coprolites
- fossilized dung reveals dinosaur diets
- first dinosaur
- named Megalosaurus in 1824, before 'dinosaur' existed
- bone wars
- 19th-century rivals sabotaged each other's digs
- soft tissue
- some fossils preserved blood vessels and proteins
lucy skeleton — 3.2 million year old australopithecus afarensis discovered in ethiopia in 1974
burgess shale — canadian fossil site in british columbia with 530 million year old cambrian creatures preserved in exquisite detail
chicago field museum — houses sue, the largest and most complete t-rex skeleton ever found, discovered in south dakota in 1990