6 Mind-Blowing Discoveries Made Using Google Earth

It turns out that mountainous terrain and civil war had protected the region from the notoriously machine gun and mountain climbing averse scientific community. Meanwhile, its location in the center of an ocean of African savanna meant it was ecologically protected as well -- whatever species were living there had spent years evolving in complete isolation from any known jungle creatures. The scientists quickly booked a trip to check it out in person.

When they finally set foot on the hidden-in-plain-sight mountain forest in 2008, what they found was practically a bio-dome paradise for biologists and botanists alike.

The result has been a treasure trove of new species -- the 27 square miles of lush forest have revealed pygmy chameleons, Swynnerton's robin, four new species of butterfly, pseudo-scorpions, crabs, monkeys, antelopes, rare orchids, giant snakes like the gaboon viper and a previously unknown type of adder, as well as entire colonies of rare birds. The list goes on like a yacht party with Noah.

Having evolved effectively in isolation, more new species are being discovered there to this day. In fact, it's getting to the point that whatever they pick up is new to science. Jonathan Timberlake, the original expedition leader, said of the discovery, "The phenomenal diversity is just mind-boggling."

Apparently the locals had kept their mouths shut about the pristine forest because they liked to hide there when things got too intense during their two-decade-long civil war that killed an estimated one million people. Yeah, that makes sense. We wouldn't have mentioned our very own Jurassic Park safe zone either.

Recognized by a local expert as a whale that lived in Egypt 40 million years ago, word of the discovery eventually reached the desk of University of Michigan paleontologist Philip Gingerich, an authority on ancient whales. This was a major find, but where he needed to be was the spot where the fossil actually originated, in Egypt. The problem was no one at the Italian stonecutting shop had any idea where the slab of rock had come from, and tracing its origins was pretty much impossible. Gingerich's only clues were that it had passed through the Egyptian city of Sheikh Fadl and the vague assertion of a colleague in Egypt that the quarry was, we paraphrase, "Probably somewhere clear the hell farther East than that ...".

To Google Earth! Yes, with next to nothing to go on, Gingerich made like a modern day Indiana Jones and ... well, sat his ass down.

Using Google Earth, he scanned eastward of Sheikh Fadl until he found a range of limestone bluffs just begging to be turned into countertops. From the comfort of his office chair, he followed them east, looking for the sorts of roads that would be required to transport giant chunks of rock via truck. About 75 miles east of the city, he followed one such road to what looked like it might be a quarry. After hitting zoom and squinting at the screen for a few hours, he had friends in Egypt confirm that the road did in fact end at a limestone quarry. At this point, he finally hopped a plane, which we're sure involved a map and a line being drawn from Michigan to Egypt to a score by John Williams.

Upon arriving, Gingerich realized that ancient-whale watching probably wasn't going to happen. However, he did notice bands of red in the white limestone walls of the quarry, which he could tell were signs of loose soil blown into ancient caves. And he knew that ancient caves were ancient animals' favorite places to get trapped and preserved forever as the freeloading real estate squatters they were. After a quick look around, he realized this quarry was full of more tiny bones than a garbage bin outside Hooters.

The bones were the remains of small mammals that lived in the early Miocene Epoch, some 18 to 20 million years ago -- the first small mammal fossils that ancient to be found in Egypt. Even better, not only may they represent some of the first mammals to migrate from Asia to Africa when the land bridge between them first formed, but they may also even be the ancestors of the giraffes and elephants and everything else you'd see in a Disney movie underneath a baby lion being held over a cliff.

If it weren't for Google Earth, they would be holding up bowls of pasta from inside of countertops across Italy right now.

These underwater traps were once used to catch massive amounts of fish all at once by trading in the typical fishing boats and rods for some good ol' fashioned interspecies cheating. As the outgoing tide forced the fish along the walls to bottleneck right toward a single gap, nets could be placed there, or the gap could be blocked and the fish would basically catch themselves. This particular trap was over 280 yards long with walls 3 feet wide, making it one of the biggest of its kind ever discovered, and is estimated to be close to 1,000 years old. It likely caught a few fish in its day.

In fact, these mass fishocide funnel contraptions were so good at their job that they were eventually banned in the Magna Carta from use in rivers, or anywhere else for that matter, except for along the coasts.

Fast forward to August of 2008, where he was subsequently exploring one of his Google Earth finds in person with his 9-year-old son, the family dog and a post-doctoral student (take a guess on who was most likely wearing a red shirt on this away mission), when the dog ripped off into the high grass.

Chasing after his dog, the boy tripped over a log and fell smack dab into what some call "the Rosetta stone of human evolution." (Okay, it's totally Dr. Berger who says that.) What his son literally stumbled over would turn out to be an estimated 2-million-year-old fossil, part of a fossil pair belonging to a boy and an adult female, the likes of which had never been seen before.

With a small, advanced brain, long arms, long legs and an advanced pelvis, Australopithecus sediba is described as probably a transitional species between Australopithecus Africanus and Homo habilis.

The newly discovered species could even be a direct ancestor of Homo erectus, making it a possible "missing link" of sorts, located right at the transition point between an ape running around on two legs when not swinging in trees and humans as we are today.

At first he thought they might be some kind of stain, like maybe a fly landed on the lens of the satellite. But it turned out the oval marked the former course of a long-gone river, and when he zoomed in, he found the rectangles were buried structures.

It appeared to be the remains of a settlement of some kind, more specifically the remains of a villa or village. He contacted local archaeologists, who looked over the site and found ceramic pieces indicating it was a 2,000-year-old Roman villa.

"Mori's research is interesting in its approach," said an archaeologist at the National Archaeological Museum of Parma. Presumably this was quickly followed by a wanking motion and a questioning of all the time actual archaeologists have ever spent doing actual legwork.

What appeared on his screen was something typically seen only on our own moon and other planets -- a meteorite impact crater 148 feet across. Since the Sahara is about as life-sustaining as the moon and other planets, the forensic evidence left by the crater was pristine. The telltale splatter pattern of ejecta rays -- bedrock scattered around the impact zone -- suggested an 8,000 mph collision with a 4.3-foot iron space pebble. The Kamil Crater, as it is called, may actually be the world's best-preserved crater, and it's estimated to be a mere few thousand years old. That's a baby in geological terms.

The space-pounded depression has left such an impression with scientists that the study leader remarked, "This crater is really a kind of beauty because it's so well-preserved that it will tell us a lot about small-scale meteorite impacts on the Earth's crust. It's so nice. It's so neat. There is something extraordinary about it."

If you want more from Scott Santens, you can read his tweets, Yelps and occasional blog.

For things Google Earth will never find, check out 7 Lost Bodies of Work (That Would Have Changed Everything) and 7 Books We Lost to History That Would Have Changed the World.

And stop by LinkSTORM to see what Google Earth found in Soren Bowie's bathroom.

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