If you’ve lived for more than a few years in this curious world of ours, you’ll know that one constant truth about the Earth is that it’s ever-changing. After all, within our lifetime, we’ve seen the technological revolution unfold before our eyes - an event that enabled you to read this very text on your computer screen right now. We could only imagine how much our planet has changed over a longer period of time, thousands and millions of years ago...
Glimpses of this mysterious world of the past can be seen when we dig deep, literally speaking, and unearth the fossils left behind by our ancestors, animals, and plants. Every year, new amazing fossils are uncovered, and in this article, we explain some impressive recent finds.
1. This huge animal is no elephant or rhino, it's a Diprotodon, the largest known Marsupial that was 10 ft (3 m) long and lived in Australia 1.6 million years ago. Now that's one huge wombat!
2. Dates and eggs found among the ash and lava in the Ancient Roman city of Pompeii (around 2,000 years old) that are extremely well-preserved
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3. Ammonites were marine mollusks that lived on Earth between 419 and 66 million years ago and reached up to 6 ft (1.8 m) in diameter. Below is a larger specimen from the Phylloceras genus
4. This Edmontosaurus mummy was the first dinosaur fossil ever found with well-preserved skin, and it allowed archeologists to reconstruct the dino's appearance with great precision
5. Archeologists found 60 pairs of Ancient Roman sandals estimated to be about 2,000 years old near the Scottish village of Camelot, here's what they looked like
6. A sea urchin from the Late Cretaceous (100.5 - 66 million years ago) of France. Unlike modern sea urchins, they used to have spines that allowed them to move through the seafloor
7. An incredibly well-preserved sea lily that's 345 million years old versus a modern red stalked sea lily crinoid (Proisocrinus ruberrimus) show how little these deep-sea animals have changed
8. This is the foot of a Megalapteryx, an extinct large bird species from New Zealand also known as the “moa” in the Maori language, and it's at least 520 years old...
9. ... Moas were some of the largest flightless birds in history, reaching up to 12 ft (3.6 m) in height, and they lived from the dinosaur era until the 16th century, when they were hunted to extinction by the Maori people
10. A massive woolly mammoth molar from the Late Pleistocene (0.126 - 0.012 million years ago) found in France, just imagine how big the whole animal must have been!
Share these cool fossils with other history buffs!
