Leonardo da Vinci: Paleontologist.

Smithsonian reveals yet another secret talent from the original Renaissance man. He was a forefather of fossil science:

In a new paper in the journal Palaios, Andrea Baucon shows that he was a pioneer in the study of both “body fossils,” or the remains of once-living organisms, and of “trace fossils,” such as the footprints, burrows and coprolites organisms left behind.

During da Vinci’s lifetime, most people saw fossils not as the remains of creatures that had lived long ago, but as the products of forces inside the earth that were trying to reproduce life within rock, constantly generating the stone “shells” and dark “shark teeth” found many miles from the nearest ocean. But da Vinci thought differently: as Baucon points out, his private notes in the Codex Leicester show that he had figured out that the fossils of the Italian countryside had once been creatures that lived in an ancient sea. His insights into the origin and nature of body fossils anticipated what the naturalist Nicolaus Steno would explain in the mid-17th century.

Tags: paleontology