Just north of Barcelona, Spain, is a massive landfill. Beneath the tons of smelly trash is a bounty of rare fossils. Since 2002, scientists at the Catalan Institute of Paleontology Miquel Crusafont have uncovered more than 70,000 fossils—and counting!
The fossils formed between 12.6 million and 11.4 million years ago, during the Miocene Epoch. They include fossils of ancient mammals like the deinothere, an enormous elephant ancestor, and the false sabre-tooth cat, about the size of a lioness. “It’s a time when the world as we know it today started to take shape,” says Isaac Casanovas-Vilar, a paleontologist working on the excavation.
The team also discovered fossils of some of the earliest primates that could climb trees—a key development in the evolution of our early ancestors.