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What is the greatest fossil discovery of all time?

By YPB Team

Skeletons that rewrote the human story, feathered finds that rewired dinosaur science, and a few celebrities with museum queues of their own.

  1. Mary Anning's Ichthyosaur — ranked #11
    Mary Anning's Ichthyosaur
    The marine reptile a young fossil hunter uncovered on the Dorset coast around 1811.
    1000pts
  2. Taung Child — ranked #22
    Taung Child
    The 1924 South African skull that put humanity's origins in Africa.
    943pts
  3. Dippy the Diplodocus — ranked #33
    Dippy the Diplodocus
    Andrew Carnegie's Diplodocus, found in Wyoming in 1899 and cast for museums worldwide.
    927pts
  4. Lucy — ranked #44
    Lucy
    The 3.2-million-year-old Australopithecus skeleton found in Ethiopia in 1974.
    600pts
  5. Tiktaalik — ranked #55
    Tiktaalik
    A 375-million-year-old fish with limb-like fins, found in the Canadian Arctic in 2004.
    600pts
  6. Borealopelta — ranked #66
    Borealopelta
    An armoured nodosaur so well preserved in Alberta that it looks like a statue.
    600pts
  7. La Brea Tar Pits — ranked #77
    La Brea Tar Pits
    The Los Angeles asphalt seeps that trapped mammoths, dire wolves and saber-toothed cats.
    600pts
  8. SUE the T. rex — ranked #88
    SUE the T. rex
    The Tyrannosaurus rex dug up in South Dakota in 1990 and bought by Chicago's Field Museum in 1997.
    466pts
  9. Hadrosaurus foulkii — ranked #99
    Hadrosaurus foulkii
    The first nearly complete dinosaur skeleton ever found, dug up in New Jersey in 1858.
    466pts
  10. Sinosauropteryx — ranked #1010
    Sinosauropteryx
    The first dinosaur found with feathers, unearthed in Liaoning, China, in 1996.
    466pts
  11. Iguanodon — ranked #1111
    Iguanodon
    One of the first dinosaurs ever described, from teeth found in England in the 1820s.
    0pts
  12. Archaeopteryx — ranked #1212
    Archaeopteryx
    The feathered Jurassic animal from Bavaria that linked dinosaurs and birds in 1861.
    0pts
  13. Burgess Shale — ranked #1313
    Burgess Shale
    A Canadian rock bed full of soft-bodied animals from the Cambrian explosion.
    0pts
  14. Homo naledi — ranked #1414
    Homo naledi
    A new human species recovered from a South African cave system in 2013.
    0pts

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