Prothero was one of the earliest paleontologists to use the concept of palaeomagnetism in the study of Continental rocks.

It showed that the trends of linear progression (in for example the evolution of the horse) that earlier paleontologists had used as support for neo-Lamarckism and orthogenesis did not hold up under careful examination.

The location has become renowned for its paleontology and is similar to many of the sites studied by early paleontologists, particularly Edward Drinker Cope.

It was founded by the philanthropist George Peabody in 1866 at the behest of his nephew Othniel Charles Marsh, the early paleontologist.

That same year, it became the center of the Bone Wars, a fossil-collecting rivalry between early paleontologists Othniel Charles Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope.

The creators of the griffin - half eagle, half lion - were early paleontologists who didn't quite have their genuses straight and put the fossilized bones in the wrong place.

E. walcotti was named in honor of Charles Doolittle Walcott, a renowened early paleontologist, that described many trilobite species.

The geologic time scale was developed based on the relative ages of rock strata as determined by the early paleontologists and stratigraphers.

Aetosaurs were later recognized as crocodile relatives, with early paleontologists considering them to be semiaquatic scavengers.

So early paleontologists assumed that large dinosaurs must have been aquatic animals, their mass buoyed by water.