How many fossils

In some parts of the world you can barely look at a rock without finding a fossil, and museum archives worldwide are stuffed with everything from ammonites to Archaeopteryx. But how many does that leave to be discovered by future fossil hunters?

Despite not having the technology or time to scan the entire planet, presenter Marnie Chesterton prepares to find a decent answer.

During her quest, she meets the scientists who dig up fossils all over the world; does some very large sums; and asks, have we already found all the T-rexes out there? See all episodes from CrowdScience. Answering your questions about life, Earth and the universe. Main content. Premium only Off-topic: Getting off the familiar fantasy merry-go-round, and loving it.

Premium only The Eurogamer Podcast: how racing games defined one of our finest. Supporters only Letter from the Editor: Feast and famine. The 10 most popular stories of the day, delivered at 5pm UK time. Never miss a thing. Watch on YouTube. Rex skull Tyrannosaurus rex T. Rex tail Tyrannosaurus rex T. Star Citizen developer plans person Manchester mega studio Squad up. Don't remodel your neighbours' homes in Animal Crossing: Happy Home Paradise if your airport gates are open Although it's not clear what, exactly, happens if you do.

Animal Crossing free update available now Nintendo releases it a day early. Digital Foundry Flight Simulator best settings: how to balance performance without losing the next-gen experience Up to 70 per cent improvement to frame-rate - and it still looks amazing. Premium only Off-topic: Getting off the familiar fantasy merry-go-round, and loving it A Deadly Education.

Supporters only Letter from the Editor: Feast and famine The only thing worse than not enough games is too many of them. Or is it? Comments 0 Comments for this article are now closed. Thanks for taking part! Hide low-scoring comments Yes No. Order Newest Oldest Best Worst.

Palaeontologists have uncovered thousands of perfectly preserved Jurassic fossils in a sleepy area of the Cotswolds. Understanding the extraordinary diversity and differences between insects can help us figure out how these species evolved. Over the past few hundreds of thousands of years Sicily was home to two different miniature elephants.

It's more common for mammals to have evolved smaller body sizes which makes it look like the brain is getting bigger. When modern humans arrived in the islands of southeast Asia, they may have encountered a range of ancient human species. By studying modern horseshoe crabs, researchers have been able to build up a picture of how some extinct arthropods such as trilobites may have fed on hard-shelled prey.

The often tightly wound shells of ammonites may be a familiar sight, but how much do you know about the animals that once lived inside? A milestone has been reached in the campaign for a statue of fossil hunter Mary Anning in Lyme Regis.

The skull shape of birds is just a tiny fraction of the diversity that would have been seen in their dinosaur ancestors. A new family of ancient marsupials has been discovered, relatives of modern-day wombats and koalas. Smart cookie preferences. Change cookie preferences Accept all cookies. Only later were they co-opted into air foils. When you think of dinosaurs, you think of places like Mongolia or the Badlands of the western United States, so when I moved to Scotland about five years ago I knew I was coming to a place where it would be difficult to find dinosaurs.

But I did know that there was one place in Scotland that had started to yield some tantalizing clues: little bits of dinosaur bones, teeth, and footprints. This is the Isle of Skye , a majestic, enchanted island off the west coast of Scotland, with a Tolkien-esque landscape. It was much warmer and equatorial, more like Florida or Spain today, and it was bursting with dinosaurs! Their bones were preserved in the rivers, deltas, and lagoons of the island.

A few years ago we found a big dinosaur track site in an ancient lagoon, with hundreds of tracks of Sauropod dinosaurs, the big, long-necked dinosaurs. It was enough to convince Nat Geo to fund an expedition, and when we went back to Skye we discovered interesting new track sites.

The one we announced most recently contains Sauropod tracks up to 70 centimeters wide. The size of a car tire! There were also tracks of some of the meat-eating dinosaurs left by dinosaurs wading in shallow water. We can see the left-right, left-right, zig-zag pattern as the animals moved around. Walter Alvarez is one of my heroes.

Walter was the first person who came up with a robust theory that an asteroid killed off the dinosaurs. He came to that idea when he was studying paleomagnetism in Italy, looking for magnetic minerals so he could tell how the continents had moved around over time.

These rocks just so happened to have been deposited right at the end of the Cretaceous period, the last hurrah of the dinosaurs, and into the Paleogene period, when mammals started to blossom.

Right in between the Cretaceous and Paleogene rocks was this thin strip of clay about a centimeter thick: the line between life and death. Walter realized that this is where the extinction occurred.

At the end of the eighties, a crater was then found in the Mexican Yucatan Peninsula by an oil company geologist. And that sealed the deal that there was this plus-mile-wide crater that could be dated right to the end of the Cretaceous—the exact same time as the dinosaurs died—and that thin clay layer was deposited around the world. That crater would have been made by an asteroid or comet about 6 miles wide, which would have struck the earth with the force of over a billion Hiroshima bombs, at speeds faster than a jet airliner.

It unleashed immediate chaos: tsunamis, wild fires, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. And probably within hours, days or weeks, most of the dinosaurs were dead. My lab here in Edinburgh, for instance, is very female dominated. Of my eight PhD students, seven are female.