Timeline of paleontology

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Timeline of paleontology

Antiquity – 16th century

• 6th century B.C. — The
  pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Xenophanes of Colophon argues that fossils of marine organisms show that dry land was once under water.^[1]
• 4th century B.C. — Aristotle posits that the stoniness of fossils is caused by vaporous exhalations.^[2]
• 1027 — The
  Persian naturalist Avicenna elaborates on Aristotle's speculations in The Book of Healing by proposing that fossils are caused by petrifying fluids (succus lapidificatus).^[2]
• 1031-1095 — The
  climate change.^[4]
• 1320-1390 — Avicenna's theory of petrifying fluids is elaborated on by Albert of Saxony.^[2]
• c. 1500 — Leonardo da Vinci uses ichnofossils to complement his hypothesis concerning the biogenic nature of body fossils.^[5]

17th century

• 1665 — In his book
  Ammonite shells were produced the same way, sparking debate over the organic origin of fossils and the possibility of extinction.^[6]
• 1669 — Nicolas Steno writes that some kinds of rock formed from layers of sediment deposited in water, and that fossils were organic remains buried in the process.^[6]
• 1699 - Edward Lhuyd names the new sauropod genus and species "Ruttelum implicatum". By doing so, he names the first prehistoric creature that is recognizable as a dinosaur.^{[citation needed]}

18th century

• 1770 — The fossilized bones of a huge animal are found in a quarry near Maastricht in the Netherlands. In 1808 Georges Cuvier identified it as an extinct marine reptile and in 1822 William Conybeare names it Mosasaurus.^[7][8]
• 1789 — The skeleton of a large animal is unearthed in Argentina. In 1796 Cuvier reports that it had an affinity to modern tree
  sloths and names it Megatherium. ^[9]
• 1796 — Cuvier presents a paper on living and fossil
  mammoths were a different species from any living elephant. He argues that this proved the reality of extinction, which he attributes to a geological catastrophe.^[10]
• 1800 — Cuvier writes that a drawing of a fossil found in Bavaria shows a flying reptile; in 1809 he names it Pterodactyl.

19th century

• 1804 — Cuvier writes about fossils of extinct mammals from the Paris Basin, arguing that they are similar to other mammals such as ruminants but also differ by dental and postcranial morphologies. He named two genera Palaeotherium and Anoplotherium.
• 1808 — Cuvier and Alexandre Brongniart publish preliminary results of their survey of the geology of the Paris Basin that uses the fossils found in different strata to reconstruct the geologic history of the region.^[11]
• 1811 —
  Ichthyosaur at Lyme Regis
  .
• 1812 - Cuvier draws skeletal reconstructions of "Palaeotherium" minor (= Plagiolophus minor), "Anoplotherium medium" (= Xiphodon gracilis), and, most famously, Anoplotherium commune based on known fossil remains (of which A. commune was the most nearly complete) and publishes them in his 1812 summary of fossil mammals from Paris. He also drew speculative reconstructions of the muscles of A. commune to showcase its robustness but did not publish them out of concern of negative perceptions on speculations.
• 1815 — William Smith published The Map that Changed the World, the first geologic map of England, Wales, and southern Scotland, using fossils to correlate rock strata.
• 1821 —
  elephants and rhinoceros, and concludes it was a prehistoric hyena
  den.
• 1821-1822 — Mary Anning discovers the world's first Plesiosaur skeleton at Lyme Regis.
• 1822 — Mary Ann Mantell and Gideon Mantell discover fossil teeth of the dinosaur Iguanodon.
• 1822 — The editor of the French journal Journal de Phisique, Henri Marie Ducrotay de Blainville, invents the word "paleontologie" for the reconstruction of ancient animals and plants from fossils.
• 1823 — Buckland finds a human skeleton with mammoth remains at Paviland Cave on the Gower Peninsula, but at the time it is not accepted that this showed they coexisted.^[12]
• 1824 — Buckland finds lower jaw of the carnivorous dinosaur Megalosaurus.
• 1829 — Buckland publishes paper on work he and Mary Anning had done identifying and analyzing fossilized feces found at Lyme Regis and elsewhere. Buckland coins the term "
  food chains.^[13]
• 1830 — The Cuvier–Geoffroy debate in Paris on the determination of animal structure
• 1831 — Mantell publishes an influential paper entitled "The Age of Reptiles" summarizing evidence of an extended period during which large reptiles had been the dominant animals.^[14]
• 1832 — Mantell finds partial skeleton of the dinosaur Hylaeosaurus.
• 1836 — Edward Hitchcock describes footprints (Eubrontes and Otozoum) of giant birds from Jurassic formations in Connecticut. Later they would be recognized as dinosaur tracks.
• 1841 — Anatomist Richard Owen creates a new order of reptiles, dinosauria, for animals: Iguanodon, Megalosaurus, and Hylaeosaurus, found by Mantell and Buckland.
• 1841 — The first global
  geologic timescale is defined by John Phillips based on the type of fossils found in different rock layers. He coins the term "Mesozoic
  " for what Mantell had called "The Age of Reptiles."
• 1856 — Fossils are found in the
  Neander Valley in Germany that Johann Carl Fuhlrott and Hermann Schaaffhausen recognize as a human different from modern people. A few years later William King names Homo neanderthalensis
  .
• 1858 — The first dinosaur skeleton found in the United States, Hadrosaurus, is excavated and described by Joseph Leidy.
• 1859 — Charles Darwin publishes On the Origin of Species.
• 1861 — The first Archaeopteryx, skeleton is found in Bavaria, Germany, and recognized as a transitional form between reptiles and birds.
• 1869 —
  Joseph Lockyer starts the scientific journal Nature
  .
• 1871 — Othniel Charles Marsh discovers the first American pterosaur fossils.
• 1874-77 — Marsh finds a series of Equid fossils in the American West that shed light on the evolution of the horse.
• 1877 — The first Diplodocus skeleton is found near Cañon City, Colorado.
• 1891 —
  Eugene Dubois discovers fossils of "Java Man
  " (Homo erectus) in Indonesia.

• 1901 — Petroleum geologist W.W. Orcutt recovers first fossils from the La Brea Tar Pits in Southern California, a rich source of ice age mammal remains.
• 1905 — Dippy the diplodocus is exhibited in London's Natural History Museum; its multiple casts and high profile make the word dinosaur a household name
• 1905 — Tyrannosaurus rex, later the world's most famous dinosaur species, is first described and named by Henry Fairfield Osborn.
• 1909 — Cambrian fossils in the Burgess Shale are discovered by Charles Walcott.
• 1912 —
  Continental Drift is proposed by Alfred Wegener, leading to plate tectonics, which explained many patterns of ancient biogeography
  revealed by the fossil record.
• 1912 — Charles Dawson announces discovery of "Piltdown Man" in England, a hoax that would confuse paleoanthropology until the fossils were revealed as forgeries in 1953.^[15]
• 1912-15 —
  predator
  that ever lived.
• 1920 — Andrew Douglass proposes dendrochronology (tree-ring dating).
• 1924 — Raymond Dart examines fossils of "Taung Child," found by quarrymen in South Africa, and names Australopithecus africanus.
• 1944 — The publication of Tempo and Mode in Evolution by George Gaylord Simpson integrates paleontology into the modern evolutionary synthesis.
• 1946 —
  Reginald Sprigg discovers fossils of the Ediacaran biota in Australia. In the 1960s Martin Glaessner
  would show that they were pre-Cambrian.
• 1947 — Willard Libby introduces carbon-14 dating.
• 1953 —
  stromatolites
  approximately 2 billion years ago.
• 1972 — Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould propose punctuated equilibrium, claiming that the evolutionary history of most species involves long intervals of stasis between relatively short periods of rapid change.
• 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 —
  Helen Michel propose the Alvarez hypothesis, that a comet or asteroid struck the Earth 66 million years ago causing the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event, including the extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs, and enriching the iridium in the K–T boundary
  .
• 1982 — Jack Sepkoski and David M. Raup publish a statistical analysis of the fossil record of marine invertebrates that shows a pattern (possibly cyclical) of repeated mass extinctions.
• 1984 — Hou Xianguang discovers the Maotianshan Shales Cambrian fossil site in the Yunnan province of China.
• 1993 — Johannes G.M. Thewissen and Sayed Taseer Hussain discover fossils of the amphibious whale ancestor Ambulocetus in Pakistan.
• 1996 — Li Yumin discovers a fossil of the
  theropod dinosaur Sinosauropteryx showing evidence of feathers in the Liaoning
  province of China.