Out With The New – In With The Old!
Receive Dinosaur Teeth, Woolly Mammoth Hair, Fern Fossils, Shell Fossils, And Trilobites In The Mail Each Month. Makes A Great Gift Idea. Subscriptions Starting As Low As $20.
Can’t Find A Particular Fossil Or Item? E-mail Us For Special Orders
Now Offering: 2, 4, & 6 month subscriptions to our “Fossil Of The Month Club,” and 3 & 6 month subscriptions to our “Fossil Of The Month Club Jr.” (For Kids)
Hello, and welcome to the “Fossil Of The Month Club,” a subscription based service in which quality fossils are delivered right to your door each month. With each subscription, you will receive amazing fossils from around the country and the world such as: prehistoric dinosaur / reptile teeth, authentic woolly mammoth hair, fern & plant fossils, fossils from the ancient ocean floor, and more. Our club is a great investment for a lifetime of learning and enjoyment.
Other Fossil of The Month Resources
Daily Science News Club Discussion Board Dino Fun On Discovery
For thousands of years , the island of Mauritius was a paradise.Spat out of the ocean floor by a powerful volcano 8 million years ago.it was soon colonised by bird and reptile life.
With warm sun, plentiful food and no predators to speak of, the isolated island became a haven for a cornucopia of flightless birds and unique reptiles.
Then in 1598,demons came to make paradise their own.Accompanied by a host of animal familiars,dogs, pigs cats (and a few rats), the human invaders found themselves facing an army of innocents.
Curious and unafraid, the Mauritian wildlife offered itself up for slaughter and within just a few decades , much of the islands uniqueness had been extingused for eternity.
The most famous of the victims was a large flightless relative of the pigeon.Mocked for their lack of guile and flightless nature, the portugese invaders called the bird dodo (this means studpid ass), or fool!.
Having never faced predators and unable to fly away, the adults fell prey to dogs and monkeys.
There young also became easy pickings as the birds built their nests on the ground.
Just 80 years after man’s arrival the dodo, which had once numbered hundreds of thousands slipped from forests of existence and into the pages of folklore.
But its suffering didnt end there.Instead of inspiring pity,their swift demise only served to reinforce their image of stupdity and, for centuries, the dodo has been the object of ridicule.
But this has begun to change.Until a few years ago,all our knowledge about the dodo had from mocking contemparary and unreliable secondary reports, a handful of taxidermised remains and just a couple of skeletons.In fact, so little did we know about the real dodo, that for some time in the 19th century ,some scientists even doubted it ever existed at all.
Then in 2005, a team of Dutch and British scientists started to unearth thousands of dodo bones buried in a formerly swampy region of Mauritius know as Mares aux Songes (Pond of Dreams).
Along with the remains of about 34,000 dodos were found the exquisiartely preserved bones of bats, songbirds and about 300,000 tortoises.
The remains are about 4,200 years old and come from a time when the island was suffering from a prelonged drought.
Mares aux Songs was a small lake that would have formed freshwater oasis in an otherwise parched environment.It is thought,while trying to reach the slowly receding waters of the lake, the animals became mired in teacherous mud flats and died of thirst or suffocation in their thousands.
Although small consolation for thousands of dodos that fell victim to the mud, the tragedy is helping to rehabilitate the image of this much maligned foul.
The very fact that the dodo was still on Mauritius 4,000 years after a drought that claimed the lives of about 500,000 animals is a testiment to the birds resilience.
