Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
The history of paleontology traces the history of the effort to understand the history of life on Earth by studying the fossil record left behind by living organisms. Since it is concerned with understanding living organisms of the past, paleontology can be considered to be a field of biology, but its historical development has been closely tied to geology and the effort to understand the ...
Fossils of organisms' bodies are usually the most informative type of evidence. The most common types are wood, bones, and shells. [57] Fossilisation is a rare event, and most fossils are destroyed by erosion or metamorphism before they can be observed. Hence the fossil record is very incomplete, increasingly so further back in time.
In the year 540 BC, Xenophanes described fossil fish and shells found in deposits on mountains. Similar fossils were noted by Herodotus (about 490 BC). [2] [3] [4]Some of the first geological thoughts were about the origin of the Earth.
Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder wrote of "tongue stones", which he called glossopetra. These were fossil shark teeth, thought by some classical cultures to look like the tongues of people or snakes. [19] He also wrote about the horns of Ammon, which are fossil ammonites, whence the group of shelled octopus-cousins ultimately draws its modern name.
Basilosaurus, one of the first of the giant whales, appeared in the fossil record. 38 Ma Earliest bears. 37 Ma First nimravid ("false saber-toothed cats") carnivores — these species are unrelated to modern-type felines. First alligators and ruminants. 35 Ma Grasses diversify from among the monocot angiosperms; grasslands begin to expand.
From antiquity, fossils of large animals were often quoted as having lived together with the giants from the Book of Genesis: e.g. the Tannin or "great sea monsters" of Gen 1:21. They are often described in later books of the Bible, especially by God himself in the Book of Job: e.g. Re'em in verse 39:9, Behemoth in chapter 40 and Leviathan in ...
And the newly studied fossils represent an earlier hobbit who was 2.4 inches (6.1 centimeters) shorter than the first specimen. Homo erectus was the first ancient human to migrate out of Africa ...
Fossils of the algae Grypania have been reported in 1.85 billion-year-old rocks (originally dated to 2.1 Ga but later revised [15]), indicating that eukaryotes with organelles had already evolved. [144] A diverse collection of fossil algae were found in rocks dated between 1.5 and 1.4 Ga. [145] The earliest known fossils of fungi date from 1.43 ...