Page 20 - The Restless Earth Fossils

Fossils 1

complete skeletal discoveries showed that Mary had found the
thumb spike of a giant reptile-like creature that was later named
Iguanodon because of its similarities with living iguanas. Some
twenty years later, paleontologist Richard Owen (1804–1892)
coined the term dinosaur to describe a diverse group of mostly
huge vertebrates (now called archosaurs) with many reptile-like
characteristics. Dinosaur literally means “terrible” or “fearfully
great” lizard, although dinosaurs are not lizards in the modern
definition of the term.
Although first discovered in England (if we exclude the dis-
coveries of ancient cultures), travelers and explorers in North
America soon turned up new dinosaur finds. American scientist
Joseph Leidy (1823–1891) at the University of Pennsylvania and
Swarthmore College described early dinosaur finds starting in the
1850s and later, including the Iguanodon-like Hadrosaurus, which
was found in Haddonfield, New Jersey.
Surveyors, railroad men, explorers, and scientists were turn-
ing up most new fossils in the deserts, plains, and mountainous
country of the American West. Such discoveries excited not only
scientists but the general population, too, with visions of gigantic
beasts that lived long before humans walked the Earth. Mantell
became obsessed with “the wreckage of former lives that had
turned to stone” just beneath his feet.

the iMportance oF Fossils today

Scientists continue to turn up amazing fossils. In 1994, the bones
of Sauroposeidon were unearthed in southeastern Oklahoma—a
dinosaur that weighed about 60 tons (54 metric tons) and stood
60 feet (18 meters) tall. In 2007, scientists studying a Velociraptor
unearthed in Mongolia in 1998 (a predatory dinosaur that was
portrayed in the movie Jurassic Park) found quill knobs on its
forearm bone, a feature associated with the attachment of feath-
ers. In 2007, researchers found a bee trapped in 10-to-15-mil-
lion-year-old amber. The bee carried the pollinaria (pollen sacs)
of the earliest known orchid species. In 2004, fossils discovered
on the Indonesian island of Flores indicate that at least two spe-
cies of humans may have coexisted just 18,000 years ago or less.

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