But huge damage was done in 2001, when then Prime Minister John Howard s government refused to allow the Norwegian freighter MV Tampa, carrying 438 rescued Afghans from a distressed fishing vessel, to enter Australian waters.

In 2009, fossil teeth of Central American primates appeared as well.

Fossilized dinosaur bones are abundant in this member in several places located in Utah and western Colorado.

Bringing together young people from different backgrounds and from different countries helps combat negative prejudices and stereotypes.

It can even be traced back to the fins of certain fossil fishes from which the first amphibians evolved such as tiktaalik.

There is growing evidence that partisan mindsets that threaten cooperation can become a thing of the past.

The promotion of Yellen and Flug is a good start now the doors of these fusty male dominated clubs must be flung wide open.

One of these, however, the dire wolf, has gained fame for the thousands of specimens found and displayed at the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles, California.

And you can tell an awful lot about what those beings looked like from the fossils, from the shape of the muscle attachments, something about the way they lived from the various artifacts found with them.

Well, shortly afterwards, members of his species started to move northwards out of Africa, and you start to see fossils of Homo erectus in Georgia, China and also in parts of Indonesia.

Between 1815 and 1824, the Rev William Buckland, a professor of geology at Oxford University, collected more fossilized bones of Megalosaurus and became the first person to describe a dinosaur in a scientific journal.

You can see some of the major fossil sites that we've been working in the north. But, essentially, two million years ago, Homo erectus, up in the far right corner, lived alongside three other species of human ancestor.

And he remained there until 1.6 million years later, when this very famous fossil hunter, Kamoya Kimeu, walked along a small hillside and found that small piece of his skull lying on the surface amongst the pebbles, recognized it as being hominid.

In 1996 satellite imaging was used to map the extent of fossilized suka kollus (flooded raised fields) across the three primary valleys of Tiwanaku, arriving at population carrying capacity estimates of anywhere between 285,000 and 1,482,000 people.

And it's this journey that is of such interest to humanity, and it's this journey that has been the focus of the past three generations of my family, as we've been in East Africa looking for the fossil remains of our ancestors to try and piece together our evolutionary past.

I spoke to a biologist at the Kirstenbosch Botanical Garden in Capetown to ask him where he thought this remarkable plant came from, and his thought was that if you travel around Namibia, you see that there are a number of petrified forests, and the logs are all the logs are all giant coniferous trees, and yet there's no sign of where they might have come from.