Fossils give us a glimpse into the past.
And while most fossils have been explained by now, a few remain scientific enigmas.
Do they come from a lost race of giants?
Outer space?
Or do we still have just no clue about our own weird world?
Here are a few mysterious fossils science still can't explain.
The Martian bacterial fossil
Countless science fiction stories revolve around life on Mars, and more than a few pseudo-scientists
have found "proof" of life in odd Martian rock formations and camera glitches.
But scientists take possible life on Mars seriously, and actually might have proof in
the mysterious meteorite known as ALH84001, which fell to Earth in 1984.
Scientists determined that the meteor was from Mars and was 4.1 billion years old.
Shockingly, it seemed to contain fossilized bacteria, and since its arrival, scientists
have debated about its true nature.
While it looks like there's bacteria embedded in it, further study has been inconclusive.
Even after thirty years of analysis, scientists aren't sure if they're seeing remnants of
mineral structures, or a fluke geologic formation.
Most exciting is the idea that planets could be constantly trading rocks through this mechanism,
and maybe even trading life as well.
You would think that a claim of alien life would get shut down pretty quickly, but the
exact nature of this little meteor is still debated.
The news was big enough to warrant an announcement from then-president Bill Clinton.
"If this discovery is confirmed, it will surely be one of the most stunning insights into
our universe that science has ever uncovered."
And the possibilities are endless.
Jurassic Park was cool, but Martian Park would be 10 times cooler.
Tully Monster
Discovered in 1955 by collector Francis Tully, the first Tully Monster fossil completely
defied explanation.
Paleontologists eagerly attempted to place the fossil within known classifications, but
nobody could figure out what the monster was actually related to.
The main part of the creature had a body like a cuttlefish and had no bones, but could keep
a rigid shape like a mollusk or worm.
Eye pods stuck out from the sides of the body, and most terrifying, the Tully Monster's proboscis
ended in a set of jaws with teeth.
Adding it all up, the Tully Monster looks like a drawing of a squid after a few too
many beers.
Because many of these fossils were eventually discovered, some samples appeared to show
a rudimentary spinal cord, letting researchers know that they could at least classify it
as an early vertebrate, closely related to the lamprey.
Aside from that, the Tully Monster still remains a baffling evolutionary turn.
Researchers are still trying to decide how it evolved, what place it held in the prehistoric
ecosystem, and whether or not they'd want to meet it in a dark alley.
Arctic dinosaurs
When we imagine dinosaurs, we usually picture them in warm, tropical climates.
But recently, scientists have discovered a new species of dinosaur living in the most
unlikely of places: Arctic Alaska.
These duck-billed dinos lived 70 million years ago in the frozen North, and have created
countless questions, forcing paleontologists to completely rethink what they believe about
dinosaurs.
Reptiles living in ice cold climates isn't really a thing, so they've totally changed
the idea that dinosaurs were only cold-blooded.
Most likely, their blood systems were much more diverse than originally thought.
The biggest mystery is how these frigid dinosaurs made it up there in the first place, so far
removed from the biggest populations of their scaly cousins.
With the mystery of their migration, blood chemistry, and the other gnawing question
of what exactly they ate in the frozen tundra, Alaska is rapidly becoming the last frontier
of paleontology.
Godzillus
In 2012, just outside of Covington, Kentucky, a group of amateur paleontologists dug up
one of the weirdest fossils in recent history.
Oblong in shape, the fossil is around seven feet long and consists of multiple lobes organized
in an elliptical shape, like a flattened cactus.
Which is not exactly what you think of when you hear the name 'Godzillus'.
Research has dated the fossil to 450 million years ago, a time when life on Earth thrived
in the water.
So some assume that Godzillus is sort of strange sea monster, especially because fossil structure
is unlike anything paleontologists have seen before.
Most oddly, nobody's sure if Godzillus was a plant or an animal.
Ron Fine, who discovered the fossil, theorized that it's a soft-bodied animal, which means
450 million years ago, there were blobby, slug-like animals larger than people wandering
our oceans.
Others believe it is merely a mat of algae, which sounds far more plausible, but also
way less fun.
The Nevada giants
The Paiute Indians in Nevada tell stories of a race of red-haired giants that lived
for thousands of years before the Paiute settled the land.
Other Indian tribes in the United States tell a similar story.
According to the Paiute, the tribes unified to defeat the ginger giants and finally kicked
them out of their homeland after a protracted war.
Settlers to the West did not originally believe the Indians' stories.
But that changed in 1911 when miners discovered Lovelock Cave.
The cave was huge, and it was previously inhabited.
When they began digging through many feet of bat guano, they discovered hundreds of
ancient artifacts, along with huge, humanoid bones…
most of which were destroyed.
"Uh!"
The site garnered intense interest, and soon amateur archaeologists and paleontologists
swarmed the area, discovering more huge bones that seemingly came from ten-foot-tall giants…
but may have just been bears.
Digging also revealed what looked like giant, fossilized hand-prints.
The most interesting find, however, were the skulls, which featured oddly shaped jaw bones,
and elongated features, and like everything else, were reportedly huge.
The skulls are now held at a nearby museum, which maintains that there's nothing too unusual
about them.
They're also not on display due to Native American beliefs.
Still, the idea of an epic battle between Native Americans and giants is pretty fun.
If that's not a movie in the next five years, humanity has officially failed itself.
The end-Permian mass extinction
Everyone knows that the dinosaurs died from a giant asteroid collision, but few people
know that the dinosaur extinction was not the only, or even the worst, mass extinction
our planet has faced.
There have been five, with the largest and strangest being the end-Permian event, which
happened 252 million years ago.
Fossil records clearly show that 95 percent of all marine species and 75 percent of all
terrestrial species went extinct, which is kind of impossible to imagine.
The biodiversity loss on the Earth was catastrophic, and it took millions of years to get back
to pre-extinction levels… and nobody knows why it happened.
A leading theory about the event is that intense global warming caused the extinction, leading
to wide-scale ocean acidification that was deadly to marine life.
Other theories are a bit more dramatic.
Geologists have discovered microscopic fractures in quartz crystals that date from the time
of the extinction, implying that some sort of massive force shook the Earth.
It could have been another asteroid collision, but an even more exotic theory held by many
scientists is that coal in Canada and basalt in Siberia might have blown up, causing a
huge ash cloud and making almost all life on Earth go extinct.
We're not scientists, but we like this theory the best.
Seems the most metal.
Thanks for watching!
Click the Grunge icon to subscribe to our YouTube channel.
Plus check out all this cool stuff we know you'll love, too!