You can download The Restless Earth Fossil ebook here.
- Title: The Restless Earth Fossil
- Autor: Gary Raham
- Publisher: The Franklin Institute
- Pages: 112
In the year 1992, a man named Charles Fickle took a walk with his dog through a half-built subdivision in Littleton, Colorado. He (or maybe his dog) found a large, rock-hard bone sticking out of the ground and suspected that it might be a fossil the (usually) mineralized remains of a once-living creature. Fickle alerted the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. In response, the museum sent paleontologists scientists who specialize in studying the remains of ancient plants and animals to the site. They unearthed the entire right leg, ten teeth, a shoulder blade, and a tail vertebra, all belonging to the meat-eating dinosaur Tyrannosaurus rex. Fickle’s dog did not get to chew on the bones, but Fickle got to chew on an unsettling thought: The world was once a vastly different place from what it is today.
What other fossil mysteries lie buried in the Earth awaiting discovery? Can these fragments of former lives serve as a lens through which prehistoric worlds come into focus again?
Ancient Romans would have called anything dug up from the ground a fossilium. That word became fossile in French, which came to refer, with a similar meaning, to everything from a miner’s gold nugget to a burrowing crab. People often puzzled over peculiar “formed stones” that looked like giant or misshapen versions of familiar—or not so familiar—shells, bones, and animals. Naturalists eventually reserved the word fossil to describe such lifelike stones. Fossils are clues to old mysteries that demand explanations: When did this creature live? What did it look like when it lived? Why did it become extinct?
Citizens of the classic civilizations of ancient Greece and Rome often answered such questions with myths and stories. The Greek city-states that nestled around the northeastern shores of the Mediterranean Sea roughly 2,500 years ago produced enough wealth to allow some of their citizens the time and means to travel within Greece, to Mediterranean islands, and to more distant lands where they encountered the fossilized bones of giant creatures.