Author: Lisa Verhagen

Mosasaurus refers to a group of extinct monitor lizard-like marine reptiles adapted to life in water (marine environments); their ancestors lived on land. This is a textbook example of evolution. During the Late Cretaceous (98–66 million years ago), highly diverse forms evolved, adapting to open oceans, coastal waters, or specializing as “shell crushers,” consuming bivalves […]

Partial skeleton (part of the torso, the cervical vertebrae, and the upper and lower jaw) of a giant ground sloth from the genus Scelidotherium. Representatives of this genus were found exclusively in South America. These original skeletal parts come from the El Caño site, located 10 km northwest of Colonia del Sacramento in Uruguay. These […]

Replica of a partial skeleton of an upright-walking, extinct humanoid named Lucy. Between 1973 and 1977, many fossils were discovered in Ethiopia, in the Hadar region of the Afar Triangle, including a relatively complete skeleton of a female nicknamed Lucy. In 1974, Lucy was the most complete known skeleton of a humanoid with a geological […]

Giant ground sloths emerged about 10 million years ago on the South American continent. Around 5 million years ago, they expanded their range through Central America into North America. These giant ground sloths are distant relatives of today’s sloths, which mostly live in trees and are significantly smaller. There were many different species of ground […]

The North Sea, located between the British Isles and the European continent, is one of the richest sites for fossilized mammal remains from the Ice Age, spanning approximately 2.5 million years. These fossils have been retrieved by so-called beam trawlers, which drag large nets across the seabed. In addition to flatfish such as sole, turbot, […]

The mammoth steppe stretched from the British Isles in the west across the dry North Sea, Europe, vast parts of Asia, and the dry Bering Sea and Bering Strait to North America in the east. This cold, dry, and nearly treeless grassland was the domain of large grazers. In addition to woolly mammoths and woolly […]

The genus name Psittacosaurus is derived from the ancient Greek word psittakos, meaning “parrot.” The name of this parrot-like dinosaur was given because its short, curved beak closely resembles that of a parrot. The species name mongoliensis refers to the first discovery site of this Cretaceous dinosaur in Mongolia. Between 125 and 110 million years […]

The musk ox, like the reindeer, is a relic of the Ice Age. In the final phase of the Ice Age, the musk ox was very common on the mammoth steppe. It is a relatively small animal with a shoulder height between that of a modern sheep (Ovis) and a cow (Bos), which is why […]

This fragment of one of the two tusks carried by a large male woolly mammoth is a European and almost a world record. The weight of this fragment is 84.8 kilograms. The circumference of the tusk is 66.2 cm, making it one of the largest circumferences ever found in a woolly mammoth tusk worldwide! Had […]