The fossilized remains of extinct and even existing species of plants, animals and bacteria allow us to look into the past and understand where we came from, how life developed on our planet, and sometimes what happens beyond its borders.
However, not all archaeological finds of the remains allow us to find clues. Some only ask questions that science is unable to provide comprehensive answers.
ALH84001
In 1984, a small meteorite fell to Earth, seemingly unremarkable. No matter how it is! Soon, scientists discovered that the meteorite is a breakaway part of the surface of Mars, which is more than four billion years old. But even this was not the most amazing find - traces similar to a bacterial form of life were found in the meteorite!
This meteorite made scientists think about a lot. And even if science has not yet been able to study a potential life form from Mars or even prove that these are really remnants of life forms, plausible theories have appeared that meteorites that broke away from the Earth could be found on other planets.
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Homo naledi
In 2015, scientists working in South Africa discovered the remains of humanoid creatures that turned out to be unlike the rest of the members of the family known to us. The new anthropoid was named "Homo ice", or "star man".
New relatives are in the evolutionary gap between primates and hominids. Some scientists believe that this unclassifiable step of evolution should not even be considered a hominid.
Tullimonster
The remains of this ancient chordate were discovered by collector Francis Tully. Paleontologists could not classify the tullimonster as one of the known families, since the creature looked extremely strange. The head was attached to a wide, almost boneless body on one side by a long proboscis neck. The small head had wide-set eyes and strong jaws. On the other side was a tail with wide fins. In fact, the monster looks like a drawing of a small child with a good imagination. All scientists can say with certainty about the tullimonster is that it belongs to the chordate type.
The remains of an arctic dinosaur
When we talk about dinosaurs, it is usually a warm humid rainforest or a hot desert oasis that springs to mind. It never occurred to anyone that dinosaurs lived in the frozen Arctic. As it turned out - in vain!
The 70-million-year-old dinosaur species perfectly managed to survive in the icy north, as evidenced by the remains found in Alaska. Paleontologists are at a loss, because if a dinosaur lived in the north, it means that its body had the ability not only to generate, but also to store the heat necessary to support life. The dinosaurs were probably not entirely cold-blooded.
Orbs from Klerksdorp
Clexdorp Orbs were first found during the mining operations of minerals in Africa. The metal spheres quickly attracted the attention of scientists and fans of alternative theories of evolution and the origin of life on Earth. The spheres are made of strong metal alloys that are billions of years old. Geologists claim that such artifacts could have been formed naturally due to volcanic activity, but this cannot be proven.
Godzillus
This name was christened an unusual find by amateur archaeologists from Kentucky. They found remains in the form of several ellipses, just over two meters in size.
Careful research yielded modest results, specifying only the age of the fossil - 450 million years. The structure of the find puzzled scientists. The fossil looks like a crushed cactus, but it is impossible to tell if it was a plant or an animal.
Floresian man
In 2003, a team of Australian and Indonesian scientists discovered the remains of a medium-sized hominid, which forced anthropologists around the world to rethink the evolution and coexistence of ancient people.
This hominid turned out to be short, a little less than a meter, but his feet were large, which led to the nickname "hobbit", which scientists still use today.
It is noteworthy that the "hobbits" were found only on one Indonesian island, and they lived, it turns out, only 18 thousand years ago - at the time when our ancestors created the first communities. This historical closeness to Homo sapiens amazes scientists.
Remains in the Chandra Wickramasinghe meteorite
At the end of December 2012, a meteorite allegedly fell in Sri Lanka. "Allegedly" is present here because the international association did not confirm his fall. Despite this, scientists began to actively study it. Among them was the outstanding astrobiologist and founder of the theory of panspermia, Chandra Wickramasinghe, who discovered traces of alien life forms in the cosmic stone, like two drops of water similar to the remains of terrestrial diatoms.
So many strange, almost miraculous coincidences have led skeptics to question the veracity of the study. Several theories have appeared that this is not a meteorite or a meteorite that broke away from the Earth many years ago and returned back.
Konrad's Skull
About 360 million years ago, the Carboniferous period began on Earth, rich in both plants and animals that lived in water. During this period, there were not and could not be people and other humanoid creatures. However, Ed Konrad's find casts doubt on this seemingly undeniable fact.
In 1981, during excavations on the island of Java, Konrad and his comrades discovered a skull that was petrified in a layer dating from the Carboniferous period, hundreds of millions of years before the first hominids appeared.
Stone doll from Nampa
In 1889, workers from Nampa, Idaho, drilling a well for a well, stumbled upon a stone human figurine buried at a depth of 90 meters. The stone around the figurine was dated two million years ago - at that time not a single hominid had ever reached the territory of Idaho, not to mention the fact that there were no humanoids capable of such skill at all.
Mysterious circles in the stone
In 1986, scientists from the University of California at Riverside discovered a mysterious stone in Wisconsin that belongs to the period when Wisconsin was covered with water. Perfect circles remained on the stone, and they were not cut into the depths, but, on the contrary, were above the surface of the stone. Scientists have never been able to determine what caused the perfectly round growths.
Giants from Nevada
The northern pyutes of Nevada have a legend about the Si-Te-Kah - a race of red giants that lived in Nevada before the pyutes were inhabited. According to legend, the Indians entered the war with the giants and expelled them from their inhabited lands. The settlers, of course, did not believe the legends, but in 1911 the miners stumbled upon a cave, which preserved many artifacts related to the Paiute culture, as well as skeletons and skulls of people, the size of which exceeded the usual size - about 3 meters high.
Causes of the massive Permian extinction
During the evolution of life on Earth, there have been five mass extinctions of species and the largest of them turned out to be (no, not the extinction of dinosaurs!) The Permian mass extinction on the border of the Paleozoic and Mesozoic, about 250 million years ago. As a result of extinction, about 96% of all marine species, 75% of terrestrial species and even 83% of insect species disappeared from the planet's surface. For the first time, insects have undergone mass extinction.
Despite the fact that scientists know the scale of the tragedy, they cannot figure out its cause. No one knows exactly why the extinction occurred. There are a wide variety of theories - from volcanic activity, meteorite fall, methane explosion, climate change to the outpouring of traps in Siberia.
Hope Chikanchi
