Timeline of paleontology

Timeline of paleontology

• 1027 — The Persian naturalist, Avicenna, explains how the stoniness of fossils is caused in The Book of Healing, proposing the theory of petrifying fluids (succus lapidificatus).
• 1031-1095 — The Chinese naturalist, Shen Kuo, uses the evidence of marine fossils found in the Taihang Mountains to infer the existence of geological processes of geomorphology and shifting of seashores over time, and using his observation of preserved petrified bamboos found underground in Yan'an, he argues for a theory of gradual climate change.
• 1320-1390 — Avicenna's theory of petrifying fluids (succus lapidificatus) was elaborated on by Albert of Saxony in the 14th century.
• 16th century — The theory of petrifying fluids (succus lapidificatus) is accepted in some form by most naturalists by this time.
• 1770 — The fossilised bones of a huge animal (later identified as a Mosasaur) are found in a quarry near Maastricht in the Netherlands.
• 1795 — Georges Cuvier identifies the bones found in the Netherlands in 1770 as belonging to an extinct reptile.
• 1811 — Mary Anning discovers the fossilised remains of an ichthyosaur at Lyme Regis.
• 1815 — William Smith published The Map that Changed the World, the first geologic map of England, Wales, and southern Scotland.
• 1821 — William Buckland finds the remains of a hyenas' den in Yorkshire, containing the bones of lions, elephants and rhinoceros.
• 1821-1822 — Mary Anning discovers the world's first Plesiosaur skeleton at Lyme Regis.
• 1822 — Gideon Mantell discovers the fossilized skeleton of an Iguanodon dinosaur
• 1823 — Human bones are found with those of the woolly mammoth at Paviland Cave on the Gower Peninsula, proving that the two had lived on earth at the same time.
• 1836 — Edward Hitchcock describes the footprints of giant birds from Jurassic formations in Connecticut
• 1841 — Richard Owen coins the word "dinosaur"
• 1855 — The first Archaeopteryx fossil found in Bavaria, Germany.
• 1858 — The first dinosaur skeleton, Hadrosaurus, is excavated in the United States and described by Joseph Leidy
• 1869 — Joseph Lockyer starts the scientific journal Nature
• 1871 — Othniel Charles Marsh discovers the first American pterosaur fossils.
• 1878 — The first Diplodocus skeleton is found at Como Bluff, Wyoming
• 1905 — Tyrannosaurus rex is described and named by Henry Fairfield Osborn
• 1909 — Discovery of the Burgess Shale Cambrian fossil site
• 1912 — Continental Drift proposed by Alfred Wegener, leading to plate tectonics and explanation of many surface features.
• 1915 — Spinosaurus to be found in North Africa is speculated to be the largest terrestrial predator that ever lived
• 1920 — Andrew Douglass proposes dendrochronology dating
• 1920 — Milutin Milanković proposes that long term climatic cycles may be due to changes in the eccentricity of the Earth's orbit and changes in the Earth's obliquity
• 1947 — Willard Libby introduces carbon-14 dating
• 1970 — The Ghugua Fossil Park set up in Madhya Pradesh, India after the discovery of Plant and Fish fossils found in the area dating back to more than six crore years back. Fossilized remains of variegated plant life are intact - frozen in stone after the volcanic activities that occurred leading to preservation of predominant plants of the Gondwanaland, lending credence to the theory of the Continental Drift.
• 1974 — Donald Johanson and Tom Gray discover a 3.5 million-year-old female hominid fossil that is 40% complete and name it "Lucy"
• 1980 — Luis Alvarez, Walter Alvarez, Frank Asaro, and Helen Michel propose that a giant comet or asteroid may have struck the Earth approximately 65 million years ago thereby causing massive extinctions and enriching the iridium in the K–T boundary
• 1984 — Hou Xianguang discovers the Chengjiang Cambrian fossil site
• 2009 — Fossils of Titanoboa are unearthed in the coal mines of Cerrejón in La Guajira, Colombia. This large snake gives a hint that Earth was warmer than 90°F (30°C)