Strange Science Turns 30

On June 20, 2026, Strange Science: The Rocky Road to Modern Paleontology and Biology turns 30! (The site launched in 1996 under the URL www.turnpike.net/˜mscott and transitioned to www.strangescience.net several years later.) Much has changed in the last three decades. Below is a tiny sampling of how scientific understanding has evolved in the fields of paleontology and biology since this little site went live.

Magazine covers

Hobbits were simply characters in J.R.R. Tolkien books. [Homo floresiensis was formally described in 2004; Homo luzonensis was described in 2019.]

Cheech and Chong routines rarely figured in fossil naming practices. [A feathered dinosaur fossil found in 1999, identified as Sinornithosaurus, was nicknamed "Dave the Fuzzy Raptor." Nicknamers credited jet lag for the unconventional inspiration.]

Echinoderms were generally thought to be blind. [A 2011 study described photoreceptors in sea urchin tube feet. As in, the entire animal can sort of see.]

Stromer's Riddle — asking what big carnivorous dinosaurs Bahariasaurus, Carcharodontosaurus and Spinosaurus ate — remained unsolved. [Studies describing gigantic Cretaceous sauropods in Egypt began in the early 21st century.]

Hallucigenia

Hallucigenia was still thought to have a bulbous head. [In 2015, Martin Smith and Jean-Bernard Caron reported that the presumed head was at the opposite end, and was really comprised of decay fluids squeezed out of the gut during fossilization.]

Human origins research still focused heavily on Africa's Rift Valley. [Sahelanthropus tchadensis was named in 2002. A pan-African evolution of anatomically modern humans was hypothesized in 2017.]

Although many marine biologists suspected their existence based on indirect evidence, nobody had photographed a giant squid in the wild. [A team of Japanese researchers captured such a photograph in 2004, unfortunately not without injuring the squid.]

Paleoanthropologists talked about a "big bang" in human intellectual evolution approximately 40,000 years ago. [A 2000 study, "The Revolution that Wasn't," challenged this view with earlier instances of modern behavior; 77,000-year-old artwork found in Blombos Cave was described in 2001.]

Sloth hunt

People familiar with teen males could guess but lacked hard evidence that a gang of Pleistocene humans might harass an 8,000-pound giant ground sloth. [Tracks and harassment hypothesis were described in 2018.]

Neanderthals were considered the primary "other" type of Eurasian human over the last 200,000 years and, with a few scientists arguing otherwise, generally believed not to have interbred with anatomically modern humans. [A fossil finger fragment found in Siberia in 2010 sparked the identification of Denisovans; multiple studies supervised by Svante Pääbo have indicated that Neanderthals and Denisovans have contributed to modern human DNA.]

Cat and pterosaur

Nobody had yet been charmed by the prospect of a pterosaur the size of a house cat. [Such a pterosaur was described and illustrated by Mark Witton in 2016.]

Outside of science fiction, few people contemplated a frog the size of a bowling ball. [Beelzebufo ampinga, translated loosely as "armored devil toad" or more loosely as "fossil frog from hell," was formally described in 2008.]

Among vertebrates, "four eyes" typically referred to wearers of glasses. [518-million-year-old myllokunmingids with four eyes were described in 2026.]