Curated category
Apex predators
- LionFossils from the Middle Pleistocene era reveal a creature larger than today's lion. Paleontologists excavated bone fragments in caves across the United…
- NeanderthalIn 1856, local schoolteacher Johann Carl Fuhlrott found bones inside the Kleine Feldhofer Grotte cave within Germany's Neander Valley.
- Great white sharkThe great white shark first unambiguously appears in the fossil record about 5.3 million years ago at the beginning of the Pliocene epoch.
- Homo erectusIn 1893, Dutch scientist Eugène Dubois named a fossil Pithecanthropus erectus. He had found the skullcap and molar in Trinil, Java, during 1891.
- TigerCarl Linnaeus described the tiger in 1758 within his work Systema Naturae. He assigned it the scientific name Felis tigris at that time.
- TyrannosaurusIn July 1874, a student named Peter T. Dotson found a single tooth on South Table Mountain in Colorado while working under the supervision of Arthur Lakes.
- Eurasian eagle-owlA female Eurasian eagle-owl can reach a total length of 67 centimeters with a wingspan stretching to 180 centimeters. These dimensions place the species…
- CougarThe word cougar comes from the Portuguese term çuçuarana, which itself traces back to the Tupi language of Brazil. In 1648, Willem Piso published a rendering…
- Golden eagleCarl Linnaeus first described the golden eagle in 1758 within his landmark Systema Naturae. He placed this bird into the genus Falco alongside many other…
- Dire wolfIn mid-1854, a geologist named Joseph Granville Norwood found a fossilized jawbone in the bed of the Ohio River near Evansville, Indiana.
- HumanIn 2015, the United Nations estimated that there were 316,600 living centenarians worldwide. This number represents a tiny fraction of the global population…