On 8 September 2023, Virgin Galactic’s ‘Galactic 03’ mission flew three tourists to the edge of space. The news that one of them (Tim Nash) carried a pocketful of priceless hominin bones has caused a backlash from the scientific community, due to their being both irreplaceable artefacts and human ancestral remains.
One of the bones was from Australopithecus sediba, which lived around 2 million years ago; the other was from Homo naledi and around 250,000-years-old. Both bones were originally found during digs in South Africa.
And so I wondered how many other fossils have been into space, and the answer turns out to be… more than you think!
The first fossils to venture into space seem to have been a piece of the vertebra and an eggshell from a baby duck-billed hadrosaur, Maiasaura peeblesorum. They travelled with STS-51F payload specialist Loren Acton on space shuttle Challenger, during the 8-day Spacelab 2 mission in 1985. Acton flew the dinosaur parts on behalf of Montana State University, his alma mater and where he later taught physics. The historic Maiasaura fossils now reside at the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, Montana, USA.
Maiasaura is known as the “good mother lizard”, because (some 76 million years ago) it cared for its young in large nesting colonies. The species was made Montana’s state dinosaur the same year.
The next fossil to go into space launched on space shuttle Columbia in April 1993. STS-55 carried the Spacelab D-2 mission, and one of the German astronauts on board (Ulrich Walter or Hans Schlegel) personally requested a bat fossil from the Senckenberg Society for Natural Research. The Palaeochiropteryx tupaiodon fossil, found in the Messel Pit, was the first complete fossil, the first mammal fossil
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