Paleontology began to take off during in the 1700s when the first discovery of a fossilized bone was first announced.

Ever since that fateful day, the interest in paleontology began to take shape and more and more discoveries were being published and announced to the world. This is just a brief overview of what happened since that day.

1770 - The bones of a huge animal which was later named as a Mosasaur were found in Netherlands

1795 0 Georges Cuvier names the bones found in Netherlands to be from an extinct reptile

1811 - Mary Anning discovers fossils of an ichthyosaur at Lyme Regis

1821 - William Buckland finds a hyena den in Yorkshire

1821-22 - Mary Anning discovers a Plesiosaur skeleton at Lyme Regis

1822 - Gideon Mantell finds Iguanodon dinosaur fossils

1823 - human bones along with woolly mammoth bones were found at  Paviland Cave on the Gower Peninsula

1836 - Edward Hitchcock describes Jurassic footprints in Connecticut

1841 - Richard Owen coins the term "dinosaur"

1855 - the first-ever Archaeopteryx fossil was found in Germany

1858 - Joseph Leidy excavates the first dinosaur skeleton, Hadrosaurus.

1869 - Joseph Lockyer begins the scientific journal, "Nature"

1871 - Othniel Charles Marsh discovers the first ever American fossils of a pterosaur.

1878 - The first Diplodocus skeleton is found at the area of Como Bluff, Wyoming.

1905 - Tyrannosaurus rex is described as well as named by Henry Fairfield Osborn

1909 - The Cambrian fossil site of Burgess Shale was discovered

1912 - Alfred Wegener proposed the idea of Continental Drift which eventually led to plate tectonics and the explanation of many surface features of the earth's geology.

1920 - Dendrochronology dating was proposed by Andrew Douglass. It was also in this same year that Milutin Milankovic proposed that the long term climatic cycles may have been due to the eccentricity of the Earth's orbit as well as the change in the Earth's obliquity.

1947 - The process of carbon-14 dating was introduced by Willard Libby

1970 - The Ghugua Fossil Park was set up in Madhya Pradesh, India after fish and plant fossils were discovered in the area. There have been fossilized remains of some plant species that remained intact.

This is particularly interesting despite the fact that there are a lot of volcanic activities that occurred in the area which led to the preservation of different plants of the Gondwanaland. This was especially important because it led to credibility of the theory of Continental Drift.