Top 10 Greatest Paleontology Discoveries Of All Time

One of the most intriguing dinosaurs we’ve ever discovered is the plesiosaur, not in the least because it’s a creature often blamed for lake monster sightings – including the famous Loch Ness Monster. Given everything we know about Loch Ness, it’s pretty much impossible that there is a long-lost plesiosaur colony living there, but that doesn’t mean they’re not interesting animals. A significant discovery in the study of plesiosaurs came in 1994, when a mostly intact plesiosaur fossil was uncovered in oil fields in Alberta, Canada. The dinosaur was named “Nichollsia Borealis” and was a major find, teaching us not only about the creatures themselves but about what North America was like 200 million years ago.

These thirty-foot herbivores were also found in North America back in the fifties, though one of the best specimens was found mummified in Montana in the year 2000. It was so important that it even got a name, “Leonardo,” along with a handful of other promising specimens given names like “Elvis” and “Peanut” over the years. This discovery was important because of how Leo’s body was preserved; it was one of our few examples of dinosaur muscles and tissues. We also have fossilized internal organs and even stomach contents, giving us more insight than usual into what dinosaurs ate. It’s an exceptionally valuable fossil and as science develops, the more we’ll learn.

It’s now one of the most iconic dinosaurs to ever roam the Earth, thanks in no small part to that scene in “Jurassic Park,” and it was one of the earliest dinosaurs to be discovered and named. The first fossils were found way back in 1877 in the Morrison Formation – better known today as the American Midwest. Its discovery taught us a lot about how huge dinosaurs were able to grow, as well as getting us wondering how they were able to get to this size: the answer is that the Earth used to be a lot warmer, which enabled cold-blooded reptiles to get to larger sizes than the reptiles and birds living today.

#7: Fighting Dinosaurs

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We don’t often find dinosaurs in interesting poses. They’ve been dead for millions of years, die in a variety of ways. But in 1971, out in the isolated wilderness of the Gobi Desert, we found two fossils locked together in an endless brawl. A velociraptor was going toe-to-toe with a protoceratops, and it seems like the protoceratops was winning. That is, before they both died simultaneously. Paleontologists have a few theories on how the dinosaurs perished like this: the leading hypothesis is that a sand dune fell on top of them, and they were crushed, frozen in time. Whatever happened, it’s an incredible fossil, and you can see casts of it in different museums today.

For a while, it was very unclear what happened to the dinosaurs; today, our best theories are that they eventually evolved into much smaller animals like birds and reptiles – prehistoric crocodiles are remarkably similar to their ancestors, after all. But we only came to accept this theory after the discovery of Archaeopteryx, a small dinosaur that seemed to be part lizard and part bird. It had wings and a beak but was still distinctly dinosaur-like in its appearance. It paved the way to make sense of later discoveries, like that of a feathery, dinosaur tail preserved in amber, and now we’re pretty sure that far from being scaly lizards, many dinosaurs did have feathers.

You may take it as a given that dinosaurs laid eggs. After all, the vast majority of birds and reptiles today do just that. But in 2011, another frozen-in-time fossil was found, this one of an aquatic ichthyosaur in the middle of live birth in China. Now, we have also found plenty of dinosaur egg fossils, and even a nest of young dinosaurs in Mongolia, but the discovery of a live-bearing dinosaur is a game-changer. And it’s not totally unheard of, there are many modern reptiles that also have live births, including every single species of boa. Because of the rarity of finding a fossil in the middle of giving birth, there’s no telling how many more live-bearing dinos might have existed.

Another well-known and popular dinosaur is the iguanodon, so named because influential paleontologist Georges Cuvier noticed similarities between the dinosaur’s teeth and those of a modern iguana – though it was the man who discovered the fossil, Gideon Mantell, who truly christened it. That was all the way back in 1825, and it took Mantell a few years to convince scientists of the legitimacy of his discovery. He ultimately did, of course, and now we know more about the iguanodon than many other reptiles. It was a large herbivore and remains one of the most significant dinosaur finds in Europe – though it lived on many continents.

Which dinosaur’s name literally translates to “giant lizard?” Megalosaurus, of course, which has that on-the-nose name thanks to it being the first dinosaur ever identified. Like the iguanodon, Megalosaurus fossils were also found in the UK, two centuries ago in 1824. The exact fossil was a large jawbone segment, complete with enormous, deadly teeth, that was nothing like any living creature. But the Megalosaurus isn’t as well-known as other dinosaurs simply because we’ve never found a complete fossil. We have a pretty good idea of what it looked like, but it’s not quite entered the public consciousness. Still, it’s impossible to understate the significance of the world’s first dinosaur.

#2: Mass Extinction

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One of the earliest people to speculate about a mass extinction was, once again, Georges Cuvier, the influential scientist that he was. He did this by comparing elephants and woolly mammoths, proving for the first time – in 1796 – that there were the remains of extinct animals on Earth. Hundreds of years later and we got the Alvarez hypothesis, the now widely accepted idea that one huge event caused the mass extinction of the dinosaurs, some 65 million years ago. This happened in 1980, posited by Luis and Walter Alvarez, and though it was baffling at the time to imagine an asteroid wiping out life on Earth, we’ve found plenty of evidence to back it up. Before we unveil our top pick, here are a few Honorable Mentions: Asilisaurus The Discovery of This Fossil Changed Our Understanding of When Dinosaurs Lived Yutyrannus Named in 2012, This Beast Was Conclusive Proof That Dinosaurs Had Feathers Deinonychus Another Piece of Evidence That Modern Birds Were Once Giant Lizards

Megalosaurus was the first named and recognized dinosaur, but it wasn’t the first dinosaur ever found. The discovery of dinosaur bones thousands of years ago may have even fuelled belief in other scaly monsters, namely dragons. The Mosasaurus was an enormous ocean-dwelling reptile first excavated in Europe in the 1780s, and it was truly a monster. It could grow up to 56 feet long – making it a similar size to the world’s largest shark, the whale shark – and was carnivorous, which you can tell by looking at its enormous teeth and jaws. And it has many biological similarities to another carnivorous lizard: the Komodo dragon, the world’s largest living lizard and one of the most venomous.