Blurs

Sometimes a fossil is more than the remains of a dead animal. Sometimes it is a geographical mystery.  A creature is discovered thousands of miles from where scientists expected it to be. A tropical species turns up in what was once a surprisingly cold region. A land animal appears on an island separated from the mainland by an ocean. A familiar species is found in rocks that suggest an environment completely unlike the one its living relatives inhabit. These discoveries can force scientists to reconsider ancient geography, climate and migration. But they also raise a more intriguing question: How many times have we underestimated the ability of prehistoric animals to cross the planet? The world they inhabited wasn't the world we know today. Continents moved. Seas appeared and disappeared. Land bridges formed and vanished. Ice sheets expanded. Deserts became grasslands, and forests spread across regions that are now frozen or barren. Coastlines also migrated by hundreds of kilometr...

At almost 9,000 metres above sea level, Mount Everest seems about as far from an ocean as it is possible to get.  Yet its summit rocks contain fossils of creatures that lived in an ancient sea. How can marine life that once lived near sea level end up preserved in the highest mountain on Earth? The answer takes us hundreds of millions of years into Earth's past — to a time when the Himalayas did not exist, India was somewhere else entirely, and the region around Everest was part of a warm marine environment. The Roof of the World Has Marine Fossils The upper rocks of Everest include limestone from the Qomolangma Formation, deposited during the Ordovician Period roughly 450–470 million years ago. Inside these rocks are fossils and fossil fragments from marine organisms. Among them are brachiopods, crinoids, trilobites and ostracods, along with other microscopic and shelly remains. So the popular claim that there are "seashells on Everest" isn't simply an internet myth....

The Burren is one of Ireland's strangest landscapes. Its vast fields of exposed limestone, broken into terraces, cracks and deep fissures, can look almost alien. Yet beneath this apparently barren stone landscape lies evidence of a very different world — one that existed hundreds of millions of years before humans, dinosaurs or even the first true reptiles appeared. Recently discovered fossils from the Burren and Donegal have revealed the remains of ancient sharks that lived approximately 330 million years ago. They weren't the sleek predators familiar from modern oceans. Some possessed strange, crushing teeth adapted to feeding on hard-shelled prey. Their fossilised remains provide a glimpse into an ancient marine ecosystem that existed long before the Atlantic Ocean took its modern form. Ireland Before Ireland Around 330 million years ago, Ireland looked nothing like it does today. The land that would eventually become Ireland was positioned much closer to the equator. Much o...

At first glance, Mongolia's Gobi Desert seems almost entirely inhospitable. There are enormous distances of bare rock and gravel, towering cliffs, shifting sands and mountains rising from an otherwise austere landscape. Water can be scarce and temperatures can swing dramatically between extremes. Yet the Gobi contains one of the world's extraordinary fossil archives. Hidden within its rocks are the remains of animals and plants that lived tens of millions of years ago, when parts of what is now Mongolia looked nothing like the desert we see today. There were rivers and floodplains. Lakes and wetlands existed in some regions. Dunes migrated across increasingly dry landscapes. Vegetation supported huge herbivorous dinosaurs, while predators followed them. Beneath the feet of these giants lived a much less conspicuous population of mammals, lizards, birds and insects. The fossils of the Gobi therefore tell us something considerably more interesting than which dinosaurs once lived ...