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490 BCE
6th Century B.C.E
Xenophanes of Colophon, a disciple of Anaximander, discovered fish and shell fossils. He later determined that the land they were on was once covered in water. -
1027
10th Century
Persian naturalist, Ibn Sina, published an explanation on the "stoniness" of fossils and how it's a result of the Book of Healing. This was a modified theory from Aristotle and involved vapors from exhaling. -
1088
1031-1095
In China, Shen Kuo of the Song Dynasty used marine fossils to determine that the coastlines occasionally shifted throughout time. in 1088, he also discovered petrified bamboos underground and determined that the cause could be linked to changing climate through the span of some time. -
1509
Before the 17th Century
Leonardo da Vinci is a man known for a lot, but one thing he isn't well known for is the development of early paleontology. He studied fossilized remains to fossilized tracks to even the remains of burrows. -
17th Century
A man named Robert Hooke published Micrographia, illustrated collections of things he observed underneath a microscope. One of his observations was called "Of Petrify'd wood, and other Petrify'd bodies" and tried to explain that petrified wood was the same as ordinary wood, though it being soaked in waters caused by biblical floods. -
1667-1669
in 1667, Nicholas Steno, a Danish scientist, wrote a paper on a shark head he sliced open. With this, he compared the teeth of the shark with a common fossil known as "tongue stones." The concluded that the fossils were shark teeth. In 1669, he concluded that marine fossils moved over to the land because of biblical floods. -
18th Century
Georges Buffon, someone who worked for Epochs of Nature, referred to many fossils, mainly ones of tropical animals like Elephants that have been found in Northern Europe to be the cause of the earth slowly cooling down. -
19th Century
Adolphe Brongniart, the son of Alexandre Brongniart, published long work detailing that the history of plants could be divided into four parts. Using this, he concluded that life existed far longer than thought and that Northern Europe used to be tropical. -
Geological time scale and the history of life
Geologists like Adam Sedgwick, and Roderick Murchison continued in the course of disputes about numerous topics about geological time, such as seen with "the Great Devonian Controversy." These two described newly recognized geological periods. These periods being the Cambrian, Ordovician, Silurian, Devonian, and the Permian. In the 1840's, the scale had been developed and put into use. -
The 19th Century
Charles Darwin played a massive role in understanding ancient fossils through his theory of evolution. His theory helped in understanding why some more recent fossils in geologic time, such as those of ground sloths, greatly resemble animals still alive to this day. It helped submit that plants, animals, life as a whole changes over time. -
1909-1912
In 1909, Charles Doolittle Walcott discovered the Burgess Shale in the British Rockies. The Burgess Shale is well known for being one of the few fossil beds for Cambrian life along with the Maotianshan Shales in China. -
The Pre-Cambrian
In 40s, Reginald Sprigg discovered a fossil site in Australia that he believed for awhile to be an early Cambrian fossil bed before coming to the realization that it is even older than the Cambrian. All fossils in this site are ground breaking due to them proving there were animals on Earth during the Ediacaran period, making them the earliest complex animals to have existed.