New discoveries are the backbone of science and, sometimes, the discovery of a few bones can alter the course of scientific inquiry forever. Here are some of the skeletons that taught us surprising new things about our planet and ourselves!
Archaeopteryx
In 1861, a strange new fossil was discovered in a limestone quarry in Germany. The small skeleton had a shocking combination of bird and reptile features. The imprints of feathery wings were clearly visible, but its body looked like that of Velociraptor and Tyrannosaurus. The fossil was approximately 150 million years old, which made it the oldest thing with feathers ever uncovered at that point. For this reason, scientists named it Archaeopteryx, which means “ancient wing”. The discovery of this fossil was an amazing revelation: it was the first solid evidence that birds were the descendants of dinosaurs! We now know that Archaeopteryx and modern birds can be perched in the same family tree, though scientists are still learning about exactly how they are connected. To this day, the original skeleton of Archaeopteryx from Germany is being used for research: scientists want to know whether or not this ancient bird was actually able to flap its wings.
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Use the Zappar app to watch the film Archeopteryx – The Very First Bird courtesy of Earth Planet:
Lucy
In 1974, Donald Johanson and Tom Gray were on a paleontology expedition in the Great Rift Valley of Ethiopia when they made an amazing discovery. Buried in rock and sand, they found the skeleton of a 3-million-year-old female hominin. Hominins are a group of prehistoric species closely related to humans. This skeleton was special because it had a small skull, but her hip and pelvic bones were shaped in a way that told the researchers she walked on two legs like a human. This was a key scientific discovery because it proved that our ancestors had been able to walk upright before large human brains evolved. This was the exact opposite of what had been thought up to that point! Donald Johanson and Tom Gray named this hominin Lucy, after the Beatles song Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds!
The skeletons of Pangea
Towards the early 1900s, paleontologists were finding skeletons of prehistoric reptiles spread out in strange patterns across several continents. For example, remains of Lystrosaurus are found in Africa, Asia and even Antarctica. Similarly, Cynognathus and Mesosaurus are each found in both South America and Africa. From their fossils, scientists knew that none of these animals could swim in the ocean or fly in the air, so how did their species end up spread so far apart?
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In 1912, a man named Alfred Wegener proposed a theory that shook the world of science. He suggested that hundreds of millions of years ago, all the continents that exist today were fused together into one supercontinent, which he named Pangea. Ancient animals would have roamed freely across this land mass, and then became separated when Pangea broke apart into the continents we know today.
Back in 1912, other scientists thought that Wegener’s idea was crazy, but over the years, we’ve developed new study techniques and conducted new experiments that tell us that Wegener’s theory was correct all along!
