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The History of Paleontology
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1027The Persian naturalist, Ibn Sina, proposed an explanation of how the stoniness of fossils was caused in, The Book of Healing. He modified an idea of Aristotle's, which explained it in terms of vaporous exhalations. Ibn Sina modified this into the theory of petrifying fluids (succus lapidificatus),
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1665Robert Hooke published a scientific work, Micrographia, an illustrated collection of his observations with a microscope. One of these observations included a comparison between petrified and ordinary wood. He found that petrified wood was ordinary wood soaked with "water impregnated with stony and earthy particles". He suggested that fossil sea shells formed in a similar process. He argued against the prevalent view that such objects were "Stones form'd by some extraordinary Plastick virtue latent in the Earth itself".
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1667Nicholas Steno wrote about a shark head he dissected. He compared the teeth of the shark with common fossil objects known as tongue stones. He concluded that the fossils must be shark teeth. Steno then took an interest in the question of fossils, and to address some of the objections to their organic origin he began studying rock strata.
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1778Georges Buffon wrote, Epochs of Nature, and in it he referred to fossils, in particular the discovery of fossils of tropical species, such as elephants and rhinoceros, in northern Europe, as evidence for the theory that the earth had started out much warmer than it currently was and had been gradually cooling.
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1796Georges Cuvier presented a paper on extinct and extant elephants comparing skeletal remains of Indian and African elephants to fossils of mammoths and of an animal he would later named mastodon utilizing comparative anatomy. He established for the first time that Indian and African elephants were different species, and that mammoths differed from both and must be extinct. He further concluded that the mastodon was another extinct species that also differed from Indian or African elephants, more so than mammoths. Cuvier made another powerful demonstration of the power of comparative anatomy in paleontology when he presented a second paper on a large fossil skeleton from Paraguay, which he named Megatherium and identified as a giant sloth by comparing its skull to those of two living species of tree sloth. Cuvier’s ground-breaking work in paleontology and comparative anatomy led to the widespread acceptance of extinction.
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1808Cuvier found a fossil in Maastricht, Netherlands (This is where the name Maastrichtian age comes from) and he identified it as a marine reptile, one that was later named Mosasaurus and eventually identified as a completely new branch of reptilia. Sometime later, he named Pterodactylus (A small pterosaur) from fossils found in Bavaria.
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1811Mary Anning, female paleontologist famous for her marine fossil collecting, discovered the first Ichthyosaur skeleton.
1821-1823Anning found plesiosaur skeletons, and hypothesized that rocks found within the skeletons of ichthyosaurs were, in fact waste, as they often contained fossils of fish and other small vertebrates.
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1824William Buckland, noted paleontologist and eccentric zoophagist, found and described a lower jaw of a large reptile from the Jurassic deposits of Stonesfield. He determined that the bone belonged to a carnivorous land-dwelling reptile he dubbed Megalosaurus.
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1831Mantell then published a paper entitled, "The Age of Reptiles", in which he summarized the evidence for an extended time during which the earth teemed with large reptiles, and he divided that era, based in what rock strata different types of reptiles first appeared, into three intervals that anticipated the modern periods of the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous.
1832Mantell found, in Tilgate, a partial skeleton of an armored reptile he called Hylaeosaurus.
1841English anatomist, Richard Owen, created a new order of reptiles, he called Dinosauria, for Megalosaurus, Iguanodon, and Hylaeosaurus.
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1859Charles Darwin publishes his book; On the Origin of Species. Although he was not the first to see evolutionary connections amongst all lifeforms, he was the first to publish his hypothesis, which has since graduated to a Theory, and is largely considered a fact by the scientific community.
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