Deserts are typically portrayed as empty wastelands. Although their surface does not have a lot to offer, there is plenty to discover underneath. Archeologists have been digging up fossils in deserts for decades—especially the Sahara Desert, the biggest hot desert in the world.

Scattered across the globe, fossils are traces of organisms from a past geologic age that have been embedded and preserved in the Earth’s crust. But despite fossils’ wide range, the Sahara Desert contains many of the oldest, biggest, and most unusual fossils ever found. These ancient relics grant insight into the history of our planet and many creatures, including humans.

10 Giant Catfish

An ancient relative of the well-known catfish was plucked from the sands of Egypt in 2017. The new species was named Qarmoutus hitanensis and is believed to have lived roughly 37 million years ago.

At about 2 meters (6.5 ft) long, this specimen would be on the upper end of the catfish size scale. Qarmoutus hitanensis represents an entirely new genus and species, making it an intriguing early branch on the catfish family tree.

According to John Lundberg from Drexel University’s Academy of Natural Sciences, the ancient fossil is more like the modern-day catfish than one would expect. “Even though the fossil is relatively old in the way we ordinarily think of ages in millions of years, it is still essentially anatomically modern and directly comparable to living catfishes,” said Lundberg. “It’s one of the best preserved and oldest of its family.”^[1]

9 Massive Crocodile

In 2014, paleontologists discovered the remains of one of the biggest crocodiles ever found. Named Machimosaurus rex, this prehistoric beast was twice the size of any crocodiles seen today. It would have weighed at least 2,993 kilograms (6,600 lb) and been around 9.8 meters (32 ft) long. The fossil was buried in Tunisia on the edge of the Sahara Desert.

The Machimosaurus rex was likely a top predator in what was then an ocean that separated Africa from Europe about 130 million years ago. “The skull itself is as big as I am,” explained Federico Fanti from the University of Bologna who was part of the team that made the discovery. “Just the skull is more than five feet long. It’s a massive crocodile. He was so big and so powerful that it was absolutely at the top of the food chain.”^[2]

Besides its size, this find is also significant because these crocodiles were believed to have died out in a mass extinction event between the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods about 150 million years ago. The discovery suggests that the extinction event was not as widespread as some paleontologists thought.

“Everyone thought this group of crocodiles went extinct in the Jurassic, but we found it well into the Cretaceous,” said Fanti. “We simply extended the temporal range of the animals. Twenty million years is a lot of time.”

8 Spinosaurus Fossil

Spinosaurus is well-known in the scientific community as one of the largest carnivorous dinosaurs to have ever lived. But one giant fossil unearthed in 2014 in the Sahara Desert has given scientists an unprecedented look at the creature. The 95-million-year-old remains confirmed a theory that this is the first swimming dinosaur that we know of.

Scientists say that the beast had flat, paddle-like feet and nostrils on top of its crocodilian head that would allow it to submerge with ease. Other ancient creatures that lived in the water, such as the plesiosaur and mosasaur, were marine reptiles rather than dinosaurs, making Spinosaurus the only known semiaquatic dinosaur.

Nizar Ibrahim, a paleontologist from the University of Chicago, said:

It is a really bizarre dinosaur—there’s no real blueprint for it. It has a long neck, a long trunk, a long tail, [a 2.13-meter (7 ft) sail] on its back, and a snout like a crocodile. And when we look at the body proportions, the animal was clearly not as agile on land as other dinosaurs were, so I think it spent a substantial amount of time in the water.

Although the first Spinosaurus remains were discovered around 100 years ago in Egypt, they were destroyed during World War II when an Allied bomb hit a museum in Munich, Germany. A few drawings of the fossil survived, but only fragments of Spinosaurus bones were found ever since. The new fossil extracted in eastern Morocco has provided scientists with a more detailed look at the dinosaur.

“For the very first time, we can piece together the information we have from the drawings of the old skeleton, the fragments of bones, and now this new fossil, and reconstruct this dinosaur,” said Ibrahim. “The hind limbs were shorter than in other predatory dinosaurs, the foot claws were quite wide, and the feet almost paddle-shaped.”

As time went on, the scientists continued to find more proof of the creature’s aquatic life. Ibrahim noted:

The snout is very similar to that of fish-eating crocodiles, with interlocking cone-shaped teeth. And even the bones look more like those of aquatic animals than of other dinosaurs. They are very dense and that is something you see in animals like penguins or sea cows, and that is important for buoyancy in the water.^[3]

7 Legged Whales

Wadi Al-Hitan (“Whale Valley”) is a paleontological site in the Al Fayyum Governorate of Egypt around 150 kilometers (93.2 mi) southwest of Cairo. It was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2005 after hundreds of amazing fossils were discovered in the area.

The valley got its name due to an incredibly high concentration of high-quality marine fossils. The most important discovery at the site is believed to be an extinct suborder of whales called Archaeoceti. These fossils represent a key piece in the story of evolution—the emergence of the whale as an ocean-going mammal from a previous life as a land-based creature.

The first whale skeletons were discovered in 1902. Initially, the site attracted relatively little interest because it was difficult to reach. That changed when four-wheel-drive vehicles became more readily available in the 1980s.

The largest skeleton found reached 21 meters (69 ft) in length, with well-developed five-fingered flippers on the forelimbs and the unexpected presence of hind legs, feet, and toes not known previously in any Archaeoceti.

Besides whales, hundreds of other marine creatures such as crocodiles, turtles, sharks, and rays have been uncovered. Some fossils are so well-preserved that their stomach contents are still intact. The incredible quality and quantity of the remains make it possible for scientists to reconstruct the surrounding environmental and ecological conditions of the time.^[4]

6 480-Million-Year-Old Mystery Creature

A mysterious creature that lived hundreds of millions of years ago was hotly debated by scientists for 150 years since its initial discovery in the 1850s. The mystery was finally unraveled in early 2019 when new stunningly detailed fossils discovered in Morocco allowed paleontologists to identify the bizarre creature.

These life-forms, known as stylophorans, looked like flat armored wall decorations with a long arm poking off their sides. Previously, scientists were not even sure if they fit in the animal family tree. However, the new study revealed that the creatures were echinoderms—ancient relatives of animals such as starfish, sea lilies, sea urchins, feather stars, and sea cucumbers.

Lead researcher Bertrand Lefebvre said that the findings were possible thanks to fossils with “unequivocal evidence for exceptionally preserved soft parts, both in the appendage and in the body of stylophorans.” Although the incredible fossils were unearthed along the edge of the Sahara Desert in 2014, researchers didn’t immediately realize that some of the 450 excavated stylophoran specimens included preserved soft tissues.

“This discovery is of particular importance because it brings to an end a 150-year-old debate about the position of these bizarre-looking fossils in the tree of life,” Lefebvre said.^[5]

5 World’s Oldest Biological Color

A team of scientists discovered the oldest color in the geological record beneath the Sahara Desert in 2018. The excavated fossils appeared to have a variety of colors.

Originally green, the fossils became bloodred to deep purple in their concentrated form. However, once diluted, the fossils revealed a bright pink pigment in an oil form. This bright pink pigment is believed to be 1.1 billion years old.

According to Nur Gueneli from The Australian National University, the ancient pigment was extracted from marine black shales of the Taoudeni Basin in Mauritania, West Africa. Gueneli said that the pigment resulted from molecular fossils of chlorophyll that were processed by ancient photosynthetic organisms that used to rule the oceans.

“Of course, you might say that everything has some color,” said senior lead researcher Jochen Brocks. He compared the discovery to finding an ancient T. rex bone. “It would also have a color, it would be gray or brown, but it would tell you nothing about what kind of skin color a T. rex had.”

Brocks continued, “If you would now find preserved, fossilized skin of a T. rex, so that skin still has the original color of a T. rex, say it’s blue or green, that would be amazing.”

Then he concluded, “That’s in principle what we’ve discovered . . . only 10 times older than the typical T. rex. And the molecules we’ve found were not from a large creature but microscopic organisms because animals didn’t exist at that time. That’s the amazing thing.”^[6]

4 New Pterosaur And Unknown Sauropod

The discovery of a new dinosaur species is a rare occurrence, but discovering two new species in one expedition is any paleontologist’s dream. One team of paleontologists made that dream a reality in 2008 when they unearthed a new pterosaur and a previously unknown sauropod dinosaur in the Sahara Desert.

The pterosaur was identified by a large fragment of the flying reptile’s beak, while the sauropod was represented by a long bone measuring more than 0.9 meters (3 ft) long. It indicated an herbivore, nearly 20 meters (65 ft) in length. Both these extinct giants would have lived almost 100 million years ago.

Pterosaur remains are particularly uncommon because their light and flimsy bones, optimized for flight, are rarely found in a well-preserved state. Nizar Ibrahim, then a graduate student at University College Dublin who led the expedition, stated: “Most pterosaur discoveries are just fragments of teeth and bone, so it was thrilling to find a large part of a beak, and this was enough to tell us we probably have a new species.”^[7]

3 Fish Fossils Lead To Ancient Mega-Lake Discovery

In 2010, scientists discovered evidence of a prehistoric mega-lake that had formed beneath the sands of the Sahara around 250,000 years ago when the Nile River flooded the eastern Sahara. At its highest level, the lake covered over 108,780 square kilometers (42,000 mi²) and reached a height of 247 meters (810 ft) above sea level.

Scientists estimate that the Nile once flooded the entire Kiseiba-Tushka depression of Egypt and created the massive lake. Deposits of fish fossils found about 402 kilometers (250 mi) west of the Nile played an important part in the discovery and were used as a sea-level marker of the lake’s highest shoreline.

Researchers also used radar data of Egypt taken by the Space Shuttle Radar Topography Mission. Geologists pieced together the profile of the mega-lake by using images of windblown sediments, sediments produced by running water, and bedrock beneath the desert sands.^[8]

A different set of archaeological sites near Bir Kiseiba, 150 kilometers (93 mi) west of the Nile, suggests a second level of the lake at 190 meters (623 ft) above sea level. The lower-level lake is believed to have covered 48,174 square kilometers (18,600 mi²). It adds to growing evidence of numerous Early and Middle Pleistocene lakes across North Africa, which could have supported human migration patterns.

2 Holy Grail Of Dinosaur Fossils

In 2013, a team of scientists from the Mansoura University Vertebrate Paleontology (MUVP) unearthed what has been described as the holy grail of dinosaur fossils—a near-complete, school-bus-sized dinosaur from the Cretaceous era. The well-preserved remains belong to a titanosaurian sauropod, a type of long-necked, herbivorous dinosaur that lived around 94 to 66 million years ago.

The dinosaur, dubbed Mansourasaurus shahinae gen, was discovered in the Quseir formations of the Dakhla Oasis in Egypt’s Western Desert. It was the sixth and youngest dinosaur to be discovered in Egypt. According to Hesham Sallam, lead author of the study, the fossils represent the most complete remains belonging to a dinosaur of this era in the entire African continent.

“The discovery and extraction of Mansourasaurus was such an amazing experience for the MUVP team,” said Sallam. “It was thrilling for my students to uncover bone after bone, as each new element we recovered helped to reveal who this giant dinosaur was.”^[9]

1 Oldest Fossils Of Homo sapiens

Miners in Morocco dug up a few skull pieces at a site called Jebel Irhoud in 1961. A few more bones were found in later digs along with flint blades and charcoal, indicating the use of a campfire. Researchers initially estimated the remains to be 40,000 years old until a paleoanthropologist named Jean-Jacques Hublin inspected one jawbone in the 1980s.

While the teeth were similar to those of living humans, the jawbone’s shape seemed strangely primitive. “It did not make sense,” Dr. Hublin recalled in an interview. In 2004, Dr. Hublin and his colleagues started working through layers of rocks on a desert hillside at Jebel Irhoud. Since then, they have found many fossils including skull bones from five individuals who had all died around the same time.

The scientists also discovered important flint blades in the same sedimentary layer as the skulls. People of Jebel Irhoud probably lit fires to cook food, heating discarded blades buried in the ground below. This made it possible to use the flints as historical clocks.

Through a method called thermoluminescence, Dr. Hublin and his colleagues calculated that the blades were burned roughly 300,000 years ago. As the skulls were discovered in the same rock layer, they must have been around the same age. Despite their old age, anatomical details showed that the teeth and jaws belonged to Homo sapiens, not another hominin group such as the Neanderthals.^[10]

However, the researcher’s claim is controversial. Anthropologists are still debating what exact physical features distinguish modern humans from our ancestors. The previous oldest-known bones widely recognized as Homo sapiens are around 200,000 years old. The new discovery pushes the date of the emergence of our species back another 100,000 years.

Fossils are the traces left by organisms – if they happen to die in just the right time and just the right place. If the conditions are correct the organic structures are replaced by minerals that can last hundreds of millions of years. Fossils are our best way of understanding ancient life but often scientists have to make do with mere fragments of bone that can be hard to interpret.

In exceptional cases a whole animal is preserved and sometimes it is tells us a great deal about how the organism lived. Here are ten fossils that capture a snapshot of the primordial world.

10 Fascinating Things Rare Fossils Recently Taught Scientists

10 A Snake Hunts a Dinosaur

In popular imagination dinosaurs were the undisputed masters of their world. Yet the dinosaurs shared their planet with creatures that would, if they got the chance, take a bite out of those terrible lizards. In one case it seems that a snake decided to raid a dinosaur nest for its meal.

Sanajeh indicus was a species of snake that lived around 67-million years ago. When the remains of this 3.5m long snake were discovered it was found beside a clutch of dinosaur eggs. Sometimes it happens that dead animals will be washed together by a flash flood and be preserved next to each other by chance. In this case though the coils of the snake show it died suddenly inside the nest. Most telling of all were the remains of newly hatched sauropod dinosaur. While sauropod dinosaurs grew up to be vast creatures this individual was still tiny, and vulnerable to snake attack.

Other fossils found nearby show other Sanajeh snakes wrapped around other eggs so this was not a one off example of snakes snacking on baby dinosaurs.^[1]

9 A Shared Burrow

250-million years after it was filled with mud the fossil of a small burrow was discovered by a palaeontologist. Even as a fossil just of a burrow from that long ago it would be interesting but when it was examined it was found to have not just one occupant, but two.

The first animal spotted inside the burrow was a proto-mammal called Thrinaxodon that is thought to have created the hole. But right next to it was an amphibian called Broomistega. Since Broomistega is precisely the sort of animal that the carnivorous Thrinaxodon would have hunted the two make for unlikely bunk mates.

Scientists who examined the specimen considered various scenarios to explain how the two ended up together. Key to understanding what happened were the injuries on the amphibian. Two bite marks on the top of the head showed it had been attacked, but the bite marks do not match the Thrinaxodon. Researchers believe that Thrinaxodon was probably asleep, or in a state of torpor, when an injured Broomistega dragged itself into the burrow for safety or to escape the sun.

Unfortunately both the burrow’s inhabitants were caught in a muddy slurry when a flash flood buried them alive.^[2]

8 Parasite Escapes Dying Host

Parasites are amazing, if unnerving, creatures. Instead of the hassle of finding their own food they are perfectly adapted to steal from other creatures. Sometimes they move inside of their hosts to get both access to nutrients and security. You might think that it is unlikely then that we would have any fossil evidence of these subtle creatures but amber is teeming with traces of parasitism.

Sometimes when you kill an insect you may witness a horrifying event. While you have rid yourself of one creepy-crawly another suddenly emerges. When a parasitic nematode senses that its host is dying it will often struggle free. A bizarrely long worm can unfold itself from a dying insect – and this can actually be seen in ancient amber.

When a little planthopper bug found itself struggling in thick tree sap its life was pretty much over. What the planthooper didn’t know was that more than one life was at stake. As the planthooper died a worm that had been filling almost its entire body cavity began to escape. Unfortunately for the parasite it was no more able to escape the sap than its host. Both were preserved for 35-million years.^[3]

7 Death March

The fossil record is full of track marks left by creatures as they wandered around in the mud. Sometimes these are large footprints of dinosaurs that recorded stampedes and sometimes they are the tiny paths worms leave as they wriggle about. Sometimes the tracks record the last moments of an animal’s life and are known as Mortichnia – Death Marches.

For one horseshoe crab we know exactly how it died because we have a 9.7m track of its last steps and the remains of the animal itself. Around 150-million years ago this young horseshoe stumbled into a lake with low oxygen levels. It fell on its back but managed to right itself and carry on its walk. It struggled of for several minutes before it was finally suffocated.

In the low oxygen water the horseshoe crab was quickly buried in mud that preserved the footprints it left in its attempts to escape the lake.^[4]

6 Pollen Sneeze

The situations that fossils preserve are often ones that persist for hours of days. Fossilised remains that are caught in amber can capture moments that only occur for seconds. Or in the case of one pollen sneeze by a plant a moment that lasted just one tenth of a second.

Usually when we think of pollen and sneezes we are imagining the allergic reaction pollen can cause us. But some plants when they release their pollen do it in short and sudden burst to make sure it spreads. In 20-million year old amber researchers discovered an extinct plant they named Ekrixanthera, meaning “explosive anther,” in the act of shooting off its load of pollen.

The plants had evolved to release their pollen into the air during short dry periods in the tropical forests where they lived. The drying of the plants puts their reproductive organs under tension that causes them to explode and release their pollen. It was this explosive sexual moment that was caught in the amber.^[5]

10 Fascinating Things About Ancient Humans You Never Knew

5 Turtle Sex

It is not just relatively passive plant sex that has been caught in fossils. For two unlucky turtles the moment of their orgasm was more than just a “little death” – it was the real thing. It seems the turtles were pretty extreme creatures. They chose to breed while swimming in a volcanic lake.

Several turtles in male-female pairs were found in sediment from 47-million years ago. They appear to have been caught in the act of love based on the way they were preserved. The pairs were found with their rear ends together and their tales in the position used by modern turtles. Before studies had identified the male and female individuals in the pairs some had speculated that the turtles might have died in some form of combat.

The lake where the turtles lived was likely saturated with toxic gases released by volcanic activity. If the mating pairs descended from the oxygen-rich upper layers they would have been poisoned by the waters below because some turtles have skin that allows gases to be exchanged with the water they are swimming in.^[6]

4 Sea Creatures Giving Birth on Land

After sex comes the moment of birth. This can be a dangerous moment for creatures and so there are plenty of fossils which record unfortunate mothers who died in the act of giving birth. Sometimes these fossils can reveal a great deal about the lives of these creatures from their birth to their death.

Ichthyosaurs were sea reptiles that were major predators in ancient seas from around 250 to 90-million years ago. Many fossils have been found of various ichthyosaur mothers with their young inside them and just after birth. Most of these show the young leaving their mother tail-first which suggests they were born at sea. One early ichthyosaur called Chaohusaurus that lived 250-million years ago was found giving birth to young who emerged head first.

Since head first birth is only found in land animals this suggests that the first ichthyosaurs crawled onto land to give birth. This would be an intermediate step as ichthyosaurs evolved to be creatures that lived fully at sea.^[7]

3 Battling Dinosaurs

Velociraptors were not quite the threat they appear to be in Jurassic Park. For a start they were roughly the size of a turkey so unlikely to have hunted down humans, had any been around. But they were still superb killing machines with large claws on their feet. For one Protoceratops in ancient Mongolia its meeting with a velociraptor was deadly – for everyone involved.

The skeletons of both the Velociraptor and Protoceratops still locked in battle were discovered 74-million years later. The Velociraptor has its vicious claw jammed into the throat of its prey in what would probably have been a lethal attack. But the fight was not going all the predator’s way. The Protoceratops appears to have bitten the arm of its attacker with such force that it shattered the Velociraptor’s bones.

The two animals are preserved in 3D and not flat as if they collapsed to the ground after killing each other. The most likely scenario is that in the throws of their final battle the dinosaurs caused a sand dune to collapse on top of them. This held them in place over millions of years and preserved them in the midst of their struggle.^[8]

2 More Battling Dinosaurs

If you asked people to name famous dinosaurs then two names that would probably come out top are T. rex and Triceratops. To find one would be the highlight of most palaeontologists’ lives. To find both would be extraordinary. To find both locked together in combat is almost inconceivable, but that is what seems to have happened on a Montana Ranch.

While out looking for fossils on the ranch the pelvis of the Triceratops was found but was almost left there as it was in an inaccessible location. Only the fact that it seemed to be next to a leg bone, suggesting a more complete skeleton, drew the diggers back. When they excavated the Triceratops they spotted a clawed foot nearby. A foot belonging to a therapod carnivorous dinosaur.

Once removed from the site and cleaned up it was clear that both animals had been fighting each other. The Triceratops had the teeth of the predator still stuck in its teeth. The predator, which may be a juvenile T. rex, had its skull split open as if it had been kicked hard by its prey.^[9]

1 The Moment the Dinosaurs Died

The mass extinction which wiped the dinosaurs from the Earth has long been mysterious. It was only with the painstaking bringing together of evidence from across the globe that a consensus has been reached that the dinosaurs were killed when an asteroid struck the Earth. Much of this evidence is complex and technical but new research may have captured direct fossil evidence of the very day the world ended for the dinosaurs.

In North Dakota at the Hell Creek formation a whole ecosystem has been discovered with signs of how it was destroyed. When the asteroid struck the Earth it sent up huge plumes of molten rock and dust into the atmosphere. The particles thrown into the sky turned to tiny pieces of glass called tektites that rained back down. At the Hell Creek site these tektites have been found embedded in amber, and even in the holes they made as they struck mud.

Earthquakes and tsunamis crossed the planet. At this site masses of fish flung onto the land by massive waves have been discovered. The gills of the fish still contain the debris thrown up by the asteroid impact.

More work needs to be done at Hell Creek but it seems like the destruction of the dinosaurs is suddenly a lot clearer.^[10]

10 Amazing Fossils Found In The Sahara Desert

Studying prehistoric times can be a challenge. We humans tend to leave a lot of stuff behind that shows we were there, but things were different before we came along. 

That is where fossils come in, a paleontologist’s best friend. To put it simply, fossils are preserved remains of ancient organisms. Most of them are bones, shells, or exoskeletons, which have been petrified and preserved in rock, but other organic materials could also have been saved in amber, petrified wood, or tar pits.

Today we take a look at some of the most bizarre fossils that have ever been recovered.

10. The Denisovan Jaw

For Tibetans, the Baishiya Karst Cave is a holy place of healing, but for paleoanthropologists, it has become one of the most puzzling places on the planet, one that likely holds answers regarding one of the most mysterious species of proto-humans – the Denisovans.

This little saga started in 1980 when Buddhist monks found a strange fossil. It was a mandible with two large teeth. It looked human but, at the same time, not entirely human. Fortunately, the monks realized that it was probably an important discovery, so they saved it and the fossil eventually made its way to scientists in China. However, those scientists were not paleoanthropologists and they didn’t make much of the jawbone but decided to hold onto it.

Thirty years later, in 2010, we discovered the Denisovans, an extinct species of humans closely related to Neanderthals, based entirely on a few small bones found in a cave in Siberia called Denisova. That was when scientists remembered the mysterious jawbone and began studying it. In 2018, they publicized their findings – the Xiahe mandible, as it came to be known, was also of Denisovan origin. To this day, it is not only the largest Denisovan fossil in the world, but also the only confirmed one that has been found outside Denisova Cave.

9. The Fighting Dinosaurs

Some unusual fossils, like the aforementioned Xiahe mandible, are notable because they reveal to us something new about an extinct species. Others, however, are simply interesting and provide us with a unique glimpse into the prehistoric past. That is the case with the fighting dinosaurs, a pair of fossils recovered from the Mongolian desert back in 1971.

These two animals – one predator, one prey – were engaged in deadly combat 75 million years ago when a sudden event, most likely a collapsing sand dune, preserved them for eternity in their desperate struggle for survival.

The predator was the famed Velociraptor, while its target was a boar-sized herbivore called a Protoceratops. The raptor appeared to have stuck one of its sharp claws deep into the neck of its prey – most likely a lethal hit, even if not instantaneous. But the Protoceratops did not go down without a fight. It had thrown its attacker to the ground and bit down hard on one of the raptor’s arms, breaking the bone. Some paleontologists speculate that their demise might not have been due to a sudden sand flow, but that the heavy herbivore died on top of the wounded Velociraptor, leaving it unable to move and, thus, sealing both of their fates.

8. The Oldest Fossil

When it comes to fossils, there is no title more coveted than “the oldest fossil in the world.” While we can’t tell you with certainty which one deserves that moniker, since it is debatable, we can tell you which one claims to be the oldest – ancient fossils from Greenland purported to be 3.7 billion years old. 

The fossils in question are stromatolites – sedimentary formations just a few centimeters tall caused by billions of bacteria grouped together.  They were found in 2016 in an ancient rock formation from Greenland known as the Isua Greenstone Belt.

Supporters of the discovery hail it as the “oldest direct evidence of microbial life” on the planet. However, controversy stems from the fact that detractors argue that the formations could have appeared through natural processes in the right conditions, so they are not 100 percent indicative of life. The debate continues, but if the Isua fossils prove to be genuine, they would be 220 million years older than the previous oldest-known fossils, which were discovered in Western Australia.

7. The Dino Nest

Despite our obsession with dinosaurs, there are several areas regarding their lives where we are still completely in the dark, and one of those is how they raised their offspring. We used to think that dinosaurs did not display any parental care whatsoever – once you hatched, you were on your own. However, that changed a decade ago, when paleontologists found the remains of 15 fossilized dinosaur babies nesting together.

Discovered in Mongolia, the fossils are around 70 million years old and all constitute juvenile members of Protoceratops andrewsi who met their end when they were buried under an ancient sand dune. The whole nest was round, bowl-shaped, and around 2.3 feet in diameter. The fact that all the baby dinosaurs were growing together inside the same nest suggests that some species of dinosaurs provided parental care, at least in the early stages of post-natal development. 

6. The Snake and His Lunch

Even if some dinosaurs were protective parents, it appears that sauropods, the giant ones with long necks, were not among them. Instead, it seems like the adults abandoned their nests once they laid their eggs and left their future offspring to their fate. One baby dinosaur learned this the hard way, as it was about to be eaten by a giant snake when a landslide buried them all, making for a highly unexpected and disturbing discovery 68 million years later.

The fossils were first found by an Indian geologist in 1987. He identified the nest as belonging to sauropods and assumed that all the bones lying around belonged to hatchling dinosaurs. It wasn’t until 2010 that paleontologists who studied the fossils revealed that some of the remains came from an ancient snake called Sanajeh indicus. 

Unlike its modern cousins, this prehistoric reptile could not stretch its jaw wide to swallow giant eggs. At the same time, it also could not break open their thick shells. So what it did was coil around an egg, wait for it to hatch, and then devour the newly-born dinosaur. That was the plan here, and the snake was ready to pounce on the baby sauropod that had just emerged out of its shell when a landslide entombed both prey and predator.

5. The Frisky Flies

Jurassic Park has shown us all the value of amber, a fossilized resin that can preserve life from millions of years ago. In real life, we have yet to obtain any “dino DNA” from amber, but it has yielded some incredible finds, as detailed by one research team from Australia’s Monash University who presented their results in 2020 after studying over 5,800 amber samples dated to anywhere between 40 million and 230 million years ago.

The team uncovered a lot of interesting fossils, but the most unique and bizarre one has to be one piece of amber that captured two long-legged flies from the family Dolichopodidae who were in the middle of mating when they became trapped in the sticky sap, with their moment of intimacy preserved for eternity in resin. 

Lead researcher Jeffrey Stillwell considers amber to be the “Holy Grail” of paleontology, pointing to the fornicating flies as an example of creatures that died approximately 41 million years ago, that look “just like they died yesterday.” 

4. The Predator Becomes Prey

Star Wars taught us that there is always a bigger fish. In this case, the expression can be taken quite literally, as one pterosaur found out to its own expense 155 million years ago.

The creature in question belonged to the genus Rhamphorhynchus which, at approximately 20 inches long, was one of the smaller examples of pterosaur. One day, the flying reptile swooped into the water and caught a fish, but just as it was swallowing it, the predator was itself caught by a larger, 2-foot long fish named Aspidorhynchus. 

Despite the size advantage, it seems that the fish was ill-equipped to handle prey the size of  Rhamphorhynchus, and its teeth got caught in the tough, leathery fibers of the pterosaur’s wing. Unable to disentangle itself, Aspidorhyncus sank to deep, low-oxygen waters together with its prey, which still had the small fish in its throat, and all three of them died on the bottom of the lagoon together, preserved as a fossil for 150 million years.

3. The Tully Monster

In the summer of 1955, amateur fossil hunter Francis Tully made one of the strangest discoveries in the history of paleontology in Mazon Creek, Illinois. It was a fossil unlike any other, that immediately defied classification and still puzzles scientists to this day.

The animal was named Tullimonstrum gregarium, although it became better known as the Tully Monster, and it is around 300 million years old. Numerous other specimens have been found since then, but all of them in the fossil beds of Mazon Creek. Therefore, paleontologists have a pretty good idea of what the Tully Monster looked like, they just don’t know what it was.

The Tully Monster had a soft, slug-like body that ended in a spade-shaped tail with fins. At the other end, it had a long, tube-like proboscis that ended in a mouth with sharp teeth that was more reminiscent of a claw. Strangest of all, the eyes were on stalks, located around halfway down the body.

Scientists have been studying the Tully Monster for 65 years, but they are still unsure if it was a vertebrate or invertebrate, let alone what kind of family or genus it belonged to. In 2016, a study published in Nature presented strong evidence to classify the strange creature as a vertebrate, part of the same lineage as lampreys. However, other studies have appeared in the years that followed which contradict their conclusions, so the origins of the bizarre Tully Monster remain very much a mysterious and controversial topic.

2. The Tiny Vampires

It seems that even 750 million years ago, when all life on the planet consisted of single-celled organisms, creatures still hunted and killed each other. That is the conclusion of a study published by the Royal Society in 2016 which found the earliest evidence of predation in the fossil record, caused by tiny vampire-like organisms.

The fossils did not reveal the killers themselves, but rather their victims – microscopic eukaryotes that had circular and half-moon-shaped holes in their membrane. These were the result of attacks by predatory organisms which pierced the outer skin so that they could feed on the juicy nucleus inside. 

Predation was one of the driving factors that led to the evolutionary arms race between predator and prey, which eventually caused the incredible diversification of life that resulted in all the creatures on this planet. If these tiny vampires didn’t start eating other organisms hundreds of millions of years ago, life today might be nowhere near as complex as it is and humans might not even exist. 

1. The Titillated Arachnid

We’ve already mentioned the mating flies stuck in amber, but an even stranger fossil involves a daddy longlegs that got trapped in the resin almost 100 million years ago. This situation was amorous, as well, even though just the male got stuck in his sticky tomb this time. We know it was amorous because the arachnid was preserved sporting a fully erect penis.

Even though we usually mistake them for spiders, daddy longlegs or harvestmen belong to a separate group of arachnids called Opiliones. The two groups differ because harvestmen have genuine penises, while most spiders have special organs called “pedipalps.” It seems that this particular daddy longlegs belonging to the extinct species Halitherses grimaldii was getting ready for some action when he got entombed by oozing tree resin in what became a piece of amber. That is why even now, 100 million years later, we can see his erect penis, which measures around half a millimeter and has been described as having “a heart-shaped tip and a bit of a twist at the end.”