# What is the greatest fossil discovery of all time?

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

*By YPB Team · Published September 27, 2026 · https://youpick.best/ranking/what-is-the-greatest-fossil-discovery-of-all-time*

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## Current results (no votes yet)

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

Tags: science, historical, dinosaurs, fossils