• Question: What is the oldest thing you have found and what was it? How far back was it from?

    Asked by anon-293602 to Lucile on 29 Apr 2021.
    • Photo: Lucile Crete

      Lucile Crete answered on 29 Apr 2021:

      When I was a student, I volunteered on a dig in France that was focusing on a old river bed (which got filled with soil through time, and is now a massive limestone bedrock) where dinosaur bones got washed away millions of years ago. After a week breaking slowly through the bedrock, I found a leg bone from a dinosaur! It was from a large herbivore, Ampelosaurus, which likely lived about 70 million years ago!

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ampelosaurus

      But that was the only time I got to work on something as old as dinosaurs, as I am now an archaeologist, and archaeologists study artifacts/bones that are related to human activities or human occupations (dinosaurs are studied by palaeontologists that are specialised on dinosaurs). As an archaeologist the oldest thing I found was a jaw from a deer that lived about 200,000 years ago. 🙂

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