Physical World/Anthropology and Palaeontology

Human evolution

Australopithecus genus evolved in eastern Africa around 4 million years ago before spreading throughout the continent and eventually becoming extinct somewhat after 2 million years ago. Australopithecus afarensis and Australopithecus africanus are among the most famous of the extinct hominins

The genus Homo was derived from Australopithecus at some time after 3 million years ago

Handy-man (Homo habilis) lived from approximately 2.3 to 1.7 million years ago. The discovery and description of this species is credited to both Mary and Louis Leakey, who found fossils in Tanzania between 1962 and 1964

Homo erectus evolved into Homo sapiens

Peking Man was an example of Homo erectus. A group of fossil specimens was discovered in 1923–27 during excavations near BeijingCro-Magnon were the first early modern humans of the European Upper Paleolithic in Europe. The earliest known remains of Cro-Magnon-like humans are radiometrically dated to 35,000 years before present. The French geologist Louis Lartet discovered the first five skeletons of this type in 1868 in a rock shelter named Abri de Crô-Magnon in the Dordogne

Neanderthal is an extinct member of the Homo genus that is known from Pleistocene specimens found in Europe and parts of western and central Asia. By 130,000 years ago, complete Neanderthal characteristics had appeared. These characteristics then disappeared in Asia by 50,000 years ago and in Europe by about 30,000 years ago. The type specimen was discovered in a limestone quarry of the Neander Valley in Erkrath near Dusseldorf in 1856

Java Man (Homo erectus erectus) is the name given to fossils discovered in 1891 on the banks of the Solo River in East Java, Indonesia, one of the first known specimens of Homo erectus. Its discoverer, Eugène Dubois, gave it the scientific name Pithecanthropus erectus, a name derived from Greek and Latin roots meaning ‘upright ape-man’

The remains Homo floresiensis (‘Flores man’) were discovered in 2003 on the island of Flores in Indonesia

Lucy is the common name of AL 288-1, several hundred pieces of bone representing about 40% of the skeleton of an individual Australopithecus afarensis. The specimen was discovered in 1974 at Hadar in the Awash Valley of Ethiopia's Afar Depression. Lucy is estimated to have lived 3.2 million years ago. Discovered by Donald Johanson

Mitochondrial Eve refers to the matrilineal MRCA (most recent common ancestor). In other words, this was the woman from whom all living humans today descend, on their mother's side. Mitochondrial Eve is generally estimated to have lived around 200,000 years ago, most likely in East Africa

Piltdown Man hoax find consisted of fragments of a skull and jawbone collected in 1912 from a gravel pit at Piltdown, a village near Uckfield, East Sussex. The fragments were thought by many experts of the day to be the fossilised remains of a hitherto unknown form of early man. The Latin name Eoanthropus dawsoni (after the collector Charles Dawson) was given to the specimen. The significance of the specimen remained the subject of controversy until it was exposed in 1953 as a forgery, consisting of the lower jawbone of an orangutan that had been deliberately combined with the skull of a fully developed modern human

Richard Leakey is the son of Louis Leakey and Mary Leakey

Olduvai Gorge is in the eastern Serengeti Plains in northern Tanzania

Chimps and humans diverged 5.4 million years ago

Red Deer Cave people are the youngest known prehistoric population who do not look like modern humans. Fossils dated between 14,500 and 11,500 years old were found in Red Deer Cave and Longlin Cave in China

Frank Boas was known as ‘the Father of Modern Anthropology’

Bronisław Malinowski was a Polish-born, British-naturalized anthropologist. He studied the indigenous culture of the Trobriand Islands, in Melanesia. Upon his return to England he published his main work Argonauts of the Western Pacific which established him as one of the most important anthropologists in Europe of that time (1922)

Last universal common ancestor (LUCA) – the most recent organism from which all organisms now living on Earth descend. This it is the most recent common ancestor (MRCA) of all current life on Earth

Lomekwi is the name of three archaeological sites in Kenya where ancient stone tools have been discovered. Recent finds at Lomekwi site 3 are thought possibly to date to 3.3 million years ago, which, if confirmed, would make them the oldest ever found

Red Lady of Paviland is a fairly complete Upper Paleolithic-era human male skeleton dyed in red ochre. Discovered in 1823, at 33,000 years old it is one of the oldest ceremonial burials of a modern human discovered anywhere in Western Europe. The bones were discovered by William Buckland during an archaeological dig at Goat's Hole Cave on the Gower Peninsula

Dinosaurs

Term coined by Richard Owen, who founded the Natural History Museum

William Buckland wrote the first full account of a fossil dinosaur, which he named Megalosaurus (great lizard), in 1824

Named in 1825 by English geologist Gideon Mantell, Iguanodon was the second dinosaur formally named, after Megalosaurus

Archaeopteryx lithographica – found in limestone quarry in Germany in 1861. Known as the London Specimen

Sauropoda – large dinosaurs. Well-known genera include Brachiosaurus, Diplodocus, and Apatosaurus (which, under current classification, includes the genus formerly known as Brontosaurus)

One of the best-known sauropods, Diplodocus was a very large long-necked quadrupedal animal, with a long, whip-like tail. Plant-eating, small-brained dinosaur. A Diplodocus cast is in the Central Hall of the Natural History Museum in London

Brachiosaurus – very large sauropod with a long neck

Albertosaurus – found in Alberta. Same family as Tyrannosaurus Rex

Stegosaurus – meaning ‘roof lizard’ or ‘covered lizard’ in reference to its bony plates, is a genus of armoured stegosaurid dinosaur

Triceratops – (Greek for ‘three-horn face’) is a genus of herbivorous dinosaur that lived during the Late Cretaceous Period

Deinonychus – carnivorous dinosaur. Means ‘terrible claw’

Spinosaurus may be the largest of all known carnivorous dinosaurs, even larger than Tyrannosaurus and Giganotosaurus

Many Anning found the first complete skeleton of an ichthyosaur ever discovered, at Lyme Regis in 1811, at the age of 12

Sinosauropteryx was the first dinosaur taxon outside of Avialae (birds and their immediate relatives) to be found with evidence of feathers, in 1996

Theropod – two-legged dinosaur

Anchiornis huxleyi is named in honor of Thomas Henry Huxley, the first person to propose a close evolutionary relationship between birds and dinosaurs

Hadrosaurids – duck-billed dinosaurs

Jehol Biota in Liaoning Province in China is the richest and widest source of fossils ever found. It was created, Pompeii-style, by an erupting volcano. The Yixian Formation forms the lowest part of the Jehol group. Provided evidence of feathered dinosaurs, including the four-winged Microraptor

Fossils

A fossil normally preserves only a portion of the deceased organism, usually that portion that was partially mineralized during life, such as the bones and teeth of vertebrates, or the chitinous or calcareous exoskeletons of invertebrates

Index fossils are used to define and identify geologic periods. The shorter the lifespan of a species, the more precisely different sediments can be correlated. Ammonites are the best-known fossils that have been widely used for this

Trace fossils are geological records of biological activity. Trace fossils may be impressions made on the substrate by an organism: for example, burrows or footprints. The study of traces is called ichnology

Living fossil is an informal term for any living species (or clade) of organism which appears to be the same as a species otherwise only known from fossils and which has no close living relatives. These species have all survived major extinction events, and generally retain low taxonomic diversities

Stromatolite – layered bio-chemical accretionary structures formed in shallow water by the trapping, binding and cementation of sedimentary grains by cyanobacteria. Stromatolites provide ancient records of life on Earth by fossil remains which might date from more than 3.5 billion years ago Found at Shark Bay in Australia

Thrombolites – clotted accretionary structures formed in shallow water by the trapping, binding, and cementation of sedimentary grains by biofilms of microorganisms, especially cyanobacteria. Stromatolites are similar but consist of layered accretions

Lazarus taxon is a taxon that disappears from one or more periods of the fossil record, only to appear again later, e.g. coelacanth

Zombie taxon refers to a fossil such as a dinosaur tooth that was washed out of sediments and re-deposited in rocks and /or sediments millions of years younger

Elvis taxon is a taxon which has been misidentified as having re-emerged in the fossil record after a period of presumed extinction, but is not actually a descendant of the original taxon, instead having developed a similar morphology through convergent evolution

Past life leaves some markers that cannot be seen but can be detected in the form of biochemical signals; these are known as chemofossils or biomarkers

Lagerstätte – a sedimentary deposit that exhibits extraordinary fossil richness or completeness

Megafauna

The term is especially associated with the Pleistocene megafauna – the giant and very large land animals considered archetypical of the last ice age such as mammoths. It is also commonly used for the largest extant wild land animals, especially elephants, giraffes, hippopotamuses

Woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius) – first recorded in (possibly 150,000 years old) deposits of the second last glaciation in Eurasia

Lyuba – a female woolly mammoth calf which died c. 40,000 years ago at the age of one month. Discovered in 2007 by reindeer breeder and hunter Yuri Khudi in Russia's Arctic Yamal Peninsula, it was named ‘Lyuba’ after the discoverer's wife

Megatherium – extinct elephant-sized ground sloth

Nothrotheriops is a genus of Pleistocene ground sloth found in North and South America. Best-known species is the shasta ground sloth. Related to the much larger Megatherium

Glyptodon (Greek for ‘grooved or carved tooth’) was a large, armoured mammal, a relative of armadillos that lived during the Pleistocene epoch

Paraceratherium is an extinct genus of gigantic hornless rhinoceros-like mammals, endemic to Eurasia and Asia during the Eocene to Oligocene. Paraceratherium is the largest land mammal known. It is also known as the ‘giraffe rhinoceros’

Thylacoleo is an extinct genus of carnivorous marsupials that lived in Australia from the late Pliocene to the late Pleistocene (2 million to 46,000 years ago). Some of these ‘marsupial lions’ were the largest mammalian predators in Australia of that time

Smilodon – Sabre-toothed tiger

Cave bear (Ursus spelaeus) lived in Europe during the Pleistocene and became extinct at the beginning of the Last Glacial Maximum, about 27,500 years ago

Panthera leo spelaea, commonly known as the European or Eurasian cave lion, is an extinct subspecies of lion

Woolly rhinoceros (Coelodonta antiquitatis) was common throughout Europe and northern Asia during the Pleistocene epoch and survived the last glacial period

Mastodons are an extinct group of mammal species related to elephants, that inhabited North and Central America during the late Miocene or late Pliocene up to their extinction at the end of the Pleistocene 12,000 years ago. Their genus name is Mammut, and they are members of the order Proboscidea. They disappeared as part of a mass extinction of most of the Pleistocene megafauna, widely presumed to have been as a result of rapid climate change in North America, as well as the sophistication of stone tool weaponry used by the Clovis hunters

Titanoboa is a genus of snake that lived approximately 60–58 million years ago, during the Paleocene epoch. It is the largest snake ever discovered

Diprotodon, meaning ‘two forward teeth’, sometimes known as the giant wombat or the rhinoceros wombat, is the largest known marsupial ever to have lived

Basilosaurus (‘King Lizard’) is a genus of cetacean that lived 40 to 34 million years ago in the Late Eocene

Eutheria is one of two mammalian clades with extant members that diverged in the Late Jurassic. The other is the Metatheria, which includes kangaroos and the other mammals (most of the marsupials) that accommodate their neonates in pouches. Except for the opossum, which is a metatherian, all mammals indigenous to North America, Europe, Africa, and Asia are eutherians. Extant eutherians, their last common ancestor, and all extinct descendants of that ancestor are placentals, in the infraclass Placentalia

Plesiosaur was a type of carnivorous aquatic (mostly marine) reptile. Plesiosaurs appeared at the end of the Triassic Period and thrived until the K-T extinction

Pliosaurs were marine reptiles from the Jurassic and Cretaceous Periods. The pliosaurs, along with their relatives, the true plesiosaurs, were not dinosaurs

Leviathan melvillei – extinct species of whale, which had the biggest teeth ever

Eurypterids (sea scorpions) are an extinct group of arthropods related to arachnids which include the largest known arthropods that ever lived

Extinctions

Dicynodontia – herbivorous animals with two tusks. Dominant in the Late Permian and continued throughout the Triassic

Hylonomus – an extinct genus of reptile that lived 312 million years ago during the Late Carboniferous period. It is the earliest reptile

The first reptiles evolved from amphibians more than 295 million years ago

Darwinius is a genus within the infraorder Adapiformes, a group of primates from the Eocene epoch. Its only known species is Darwinius masillae, approximately 47 million years ago. The only known fossil, called Ida, was discovered in 1983 at the Messel pit

Hyracotherium, known as the Dawn Horse, is a dog-sized ancestor of the horse which was found in the London Clay formation

Confuciusornis is a genus of primitive crow-sized birds from the Early Cretaceous. It is the oldest known bird to have a beak

Trilobites (meaning ‘three lobes’) are a fossil group of extinct marine arthropods that flourished throughout the lower Paleozoic era before beginning a drawn-out decline to extinction when, during the Devonian, all trilobite orders, with the sole exception of Proetida, died out. Trilobites finally disappeared in the mass extinction at the end of the Permian about 250 million years. Trilobites had complex, compound eyes with lenses made of calcite

Ammonites are an extinct group of marine animals belonging to the cephalopod subclass Ammonoidea. They are excellent index fossils, and it is often possible to link the rock layer in which they are found to specific geological time periods. The closest living relative of the Ammonitida is not the modern Nautilus, but rather the subclass Coleoidea (octopus, squid, and cuttlefish). The earliest ammonites appear during the Devonian, and the last species died out during the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event

Charnia – fossil named after Charnwood Forest, where the first specimen was found

Mistaken Point, Newfoundland contains one of the most diverse and well-preserved collections of Precambrian fossils known to man

A fern spike is the occurrence of abundant fern spores in the fossil record, usually immediately (in a geological sense) after an extinction event

Brachiopods are marine animals that have hard ‘valves’ (shells) on the upper and lower surfaces. At their peak in the Paleozoic era, the brachiopods were among the most abundant filter-feeders and reef-builders

Crinoids – marine animals. Echinoderms that first appeared in the Ordovician period. Sea lilies refer to the crinoids which, in their adult form, are attached to the sea bottom by a stalk

Blastoids – an extinct type of stemmed echinoderm. Often called sea buds, blastoid fossils look like small hickory nuts

Charles Walcott discovered the first fossils in the Burgess Shale in 1909

Anomalocaris (‘abnormal shrimp’) was found in the Burgess Shale

Nummulite is a large fossil, characterized by its numerous coils, subdivided into chambers. They are the shells of the fossil and present-day marine protozoan Nummulites, a type of foraminiferan

Recent extinctions

Thylacine – Tasmanian Tiger. The last thylacine, later referred to as Benjamin, was captured in 1933 and sent to the Hobart Zoo where it died in 1936

Great Auk believed to have became extinct in 1844, off Iceland

Elephant birds, which were giant ratites native to Madagascar, have been extinct since at least the 16th century. Aepyornis was the world's largest bird, believed to have been over 3m tall and weighing close to half a tonne

Moa – extinct flightless bird endemic to New Zealand

Passenger Pigeon (Ectopistes migratorius) is an extinct species of pigeon that was once probably the most common bird in the world. It is estimated that there were as many as five billion Passenger Pigeons in the United States. The last Passenger Pigeon, named Martha, died in the Cincinnati Zoo in 1914

Caspian, Javan – extinct tigers

Quagga – an extinct subspecies of the plains zebra, which was once found in great numbers in South Africa's Cape Province and the Orange Free State. It was distinguished from other zebras by having the usual vivid marks on the front part of the body only

Auroch – extinct cow

Dodo became extinct by 1681

Rodrigues Solitaire is an extinct, flightless bird that was endemic to the island of Rodrigues, east of Madagascar. It was most closely related to the Dodo

Huia was the largest species of New Zealand wattlebird. It became extinct in the early 20th century