October 11th, 2016 is National Fossil Day.
No, I’m not talking about your 95-year-old grandma, or the old guy who lives down your street who like to talk about the good old days when you could go out on the town and have a nice dinner for a quarter and two shiny pennies. Though that may seem like it was a long time ago, the earth tends to view time in terms of millennia (if that!), not decades, so we’re going to have to look a little further back in time to discover what the root of this celebration is all about.
This whole week is actually National Earth Science Week for all you Enviro kids out there, and today is the day when we single out all of the long-dead things petrified in rock that we dig up in the name of science! It was started in 2010 by the National Park Service to raise awareness for the non-renewable resources that are fossils, as well as to promote the paleontological path of life (try saying that three times fast). Now, the history of the day itself is all well and good, but the real interesting part comes with some of the ancient history this day celebrates–so, without further ado, here are some of the world’s oldest fossils.
- The earliest evidence for life on earth was found in Greenland about four years ago in rocks near the Isau region. These little petrified microbes were found in 3.9 billion year old stromatolites. Just for perspective, at that point the earth was a being bombarded by asteroids, so forcefully they’d break off a chunk that would later become the moon, and humans wouldn’t make an appearance for another, oh, three billion years or so.
- The oldest food ever found still intact was a bowl of noodles near the Yellow River in China nearly 4000 years old. After a particularly bad earthquake, the unfortunate consumer of the noodles left his bowl in his haste to escape the subsequent flooding, and the vacuum created allowed the millet grass noodles to be preserved for millennia.
- The oldest person to ever live was a French woman by the name of Jeanne Calment, whose lifetime began in a world without cars or electricity and ended with the dawn of the Internet and space travel (she lived from 1875 to 1997, passing away at the ripe old age of 122 years, 164 days). The oldest living person is Emma Morano of Italy, who is currently 116 years old.
If you’re interested in learning more about National Fossil Day, feel free to check out the official website to see events happening near you (spoiler alert: the artwork for this year’s National Fossil Day features animals from the Pleistocene era–how exciting?).
