Fossil finds Evidence of the past Fossils are one of the biggest clues that life today is not the same as it once was While some early thinkers such as Xenophanes used fossils as evidence for scientific ideas they also led to many myths and stories Dragons for example which appear in the folklore of many different cultures may have been invented as an explanation for dinosaur fossils 10 THAT’S A FACT Mary Anning found the skeleton of a giant sea creature called an ichthyosaur when she was just 12 years old Fossil-hunting fever From the 1600s scientists began to take fossils seriously as a part of scientific study Fossil hunters such as William Buckland Gideon Mantell and Mary Anning became famous for their discoveries There was much debate about what these ancient remains were and why the creatures they came from were no longer around The giant’s thighbone In 1676 someone sent a fossil bone found near Oxford This picture by Gustave Doré illustrates a story of human-like giants Giants figure in the folklore of many countries around the world The myths may have developed as a way to explain the discovery of large fossils
Mary Anning Date of birth May 21 1799 Place of birth Lyme Regis England Greatest achievement Anning’s discovery of important ichthyosaur and plesiosaur fossils Interesting fact After her father died in 1810 Mary Anning sold her fossil finds to scientists in order to support her family She became so respected that she was given honorary membership in the Geological Society of London which women were not normally allowed to join Date of death March 9 1847 If then they are neither the Bones of Horses Oxen nor Elephants as I am strongly persuaded they are not It remains that notwithstanding their extravagant Magnitude they must have been the bones of Men or Women Robert Plot in his book The Natural History of Oxfordshire published 1705 writing about where the giant thigh bones could have come from England to a scientist named Robert Plot to study Until then Plot thought fossils were nothing to do with ancient creatures but were just chance formations in rock But when he saw the new fossil he changed his mind He realized it looked exactly like the lower end of a human femur or thighbone but much too big At first he thought it might be from an elephant Then he changed his mind and decided it had belonged to a giant human We now know that it came from a type of dinosaur called Megalosaurus Breakthrough Robert Plot’s discoveries and descriptions of fossils opened up a whole new area of science the study of prehistoric life This was to become known as paleontology 11
Evolution the great debate The evidence grows So had life changed over time or not As the 1700s and 1800s went on there seemed to be very clear evidence from fossils that it had All kinds of creatures were being discovered that no one had ever seen alive or that were much bigger than their present-day descendants Life it seemed must have been evolving for many years Religious worries However many people did not like the idea of evolution at all because it cast doubt on their religious beliefs Many Christians held the traditional belief that a divine being created all life-forms just as they are now If evolution was true could religious teaching be wrong The debate As scientists came up with more ideas and evidence a great debate began about whether evolution had really happened at all Among the important points in this debate were the following 1778 French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc 1707 88 claimed that evolution was true and in fact all life had evolved from a single first life-form Giraffes long necks enable them to reach the leaves of the trees from which they feed Scientist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck believed that their ancestors had stretched their necks by reaching upward and then passed this feature on to their young
1809 Another Frenchman Jean-Baptiste Lamarck 1744 1829 developed a theory of evolution that said animals changed slowly within their lifetimes and then passed on these changes to their young 1817 The great fossil expert Georges Cuvier 1769 1832 said the fossils he had studied were very old and the creatures were now extinct He also showed how some prehistoric extinct creatures looked similar to but not the same as modern animals These included for example woolly mammoths resembling modern elephants Although many scientists were aware of this it was still a controversial idea Would it not be glorious for man to burst the limits of time and by a few observations to ascertain the history of this world and the series of events which preceded the birth of the human race Georges Cuvier in Researches on Fossil Bones published 1812 Some Christian leaders argued against these scientists and in some cases forced them to retract take back what they had said The Christian leaders claimed that some animals were no longer with us because of Noah’s flood which also explained why sea fossils were found A fossil skull of a mammoth The paleontologist Georges Cuvier noted how woolly mammoths which died out around 5,000 years ago resembled modern elephants on dry land However that didn’t explain why so many sea creatures had died out too How could the flood account for fossils of ancient sharks and other sea creatures which should have survived it Breakthrough Georges Cuvier’s studies revealed a huge amount about what prehistoric life had actually been like and how different it was from today The prehistoric animals he discovered included woolly mammoths and giant sloths 13
