| Timeline of geography, paleontology |
| Date |
Event |
| 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. |
| 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 Milankovic 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 |
