Timeline of geography, paleontology

• 25 - Pomponius Mela formalizes the climatic zone system
• 1569 - Gerardus Mercator issues the first Mercator projection map
• 1620 - Francis Bacon analyzes the scientific method in his Great Instauration of Learning
• 1686 - Edmund Halley presents a systematic study of the trade winds and monsoons and identifies solar heating as the cause of atmospheric motions
• 1686 - Edmund Halley establishes the relationship between barometric pressure and height above sea level
• 1716 - Edmund Halley suggests that polar aurorae are caused by "magnetic effluvia" moving along the Earth's magnetic field lines
• 1770 - The fossilised bones of a huge animal (later identified as a Mosasaur) are found in a quarry near Maastricht in the Netherlands.
• 1795 - Georges Cuvier identifies the bones found in the Netherlands in 1770 as belonging to an extinct reptile.
• 1811 - Mary Anning discovers the fossilised remains of an ichthyosaur at Lyme Regis.
• 1821 - William Buckland finds the remains of a hyenas' den in Yorkshire, containing the bones of lions, elephants and rhinoceros.
• 1821-22 - Mary Anning discovers the world's first Plesiosaur skeleton at Lyme Regis.
• 1822 - Gideon Mantell discovers the fossilized skeleton of an Iguanodon dinosaur
• 1823 - Human bones are found with those of the woolly mammoth at Paviland Cave on the Gower Peninsula, proving that the two had lived on earth at the same time.
• 1836 - Edward Hitchcock describes the footprints of giant birds from Jurassic formations in Connecticut
• 1841 - Richard Owen coins the word "dinosaur"
• 1855 - The first Archaeopteryx fossil found in Bavaria, Germany.
• 1858 - The first dinosaur skeleton, Hadrosaurus, is excavated in the United States and described by Joseph Leidy
• 1869 - Joseph Lockyer starts the scientific journal Nature
• 1871 - Othniel Charles Marsh discovers the first American pterosaur fossils.
• 1878 - The first Diplodocus skeleton is found at Como Bluff, Wyoming
• 1905 - Tyrannosaurus rex is described and named by Henry Fairfield Osborn
• 1909 - Discovery of the Burgess Shale Cambrian fossil site
• 1912 - Continental Drift proposed by Alfred Wegener, leading to plate tectonics and explanation of many surface features.
• 1920 - Andrew Douglass proposes dendrochronology dating
• 1920 - Milutin Milanković proposes that long term climatic cycles may be due to changes in the eccentricity of the Earth's orbit and changes in the Earth's obliquity
• 1947 - Willard Libby introduces carbon-14 dating
• 1974 - Donald Johanson and Tom Gray discover a 3.5 million-year-old female hominid fossil that is 40% complete and name it "Lucy"
• 1980 - Luis Alvarez, Walter Alvarez, Frank Asaro, and Helen Michel propose that a giant comet or asteroid may have struck the Earth approximately 65 million years ago thereby causing massive extinctions and enriching the iridium in the K-T layer
• 1984 - Hou Xianguang discovers the Chengjiang Cambrian fossil site

Geology timelines