All posts tagged with fossils

Over the past few months, I’ve been working as the Biodiversity Heritage Library Flickr Content Volunteer. As someone who really values the cross-section between art and science, it’s a fascinating task. The Flickr page is full of beautiful images of flowers, birds, and butterflies.

Do you know your state flower or bird? What about your state fossil? It is okay if you know the first two and not the third. Many don’t know their state fossil. There’s no better time to discover it than today — National Fossil Day.

On March 9th, the world marked the 166th anniversary of the death of Mary Anning, one of the bravest and most diligent amateur naturalists in history. Despite remarkable discoveries for which she was well compensated, her status as a self-taught, working-class woman meant that Mary Anning’s existence in the published record of science is spotty at best. Her story is nearly unbelievable from the start.

We often take it for granted that humans have always known about the existence of the dinosaurs, and that there was never a dispute that they could be anything but the prehistoric giants that we now know them to be. However, this is not the case. As far back as the early 1800s, people had no idea that an entire era of awe-inspiring creatures had lived and died on their planet. Dinosaur fossils that were discovered were attributed to other things, such as the 1676 discovery of most probably a Megalosaurus thigh bone by English museum curator Robert Plot, who believed that thigh bone belonged to a giant man.