The exhibition at the Center features a Triassic ichthyosaur specimen from the Besano Formation on the border between Italy and Switzerland. The specimen arrived in Krakow in 1902, brought in three pieces by Professor Józef Grzybowski, a pioneer in the use of microfossils in oil exploration.

Mary Anning was born in 1799 in Lyme Regis, England, one of ten children. Of her siblings, only Mary and her older brother, Joseph, survived to adulthood. Mary's father, Richard, was a carpenter and an amateur fossil collector. Even as a child, Mary helped him in his searches and learned how to prepare fossils found on nearby beaches, which they later sold to tourists.

Did you know that yesterday was World Bread Day? Today, bread can be bought almost everywhere (at least in our part of the world), but for a large part of our history, it was a luxury item. A large one, meaning how long, exactly? Have you ever wondered when bread was invented?

If we were in Europe at the end of the Jurassic period and had a precise map, it would have been difficult to figure out where we were. Much of the continent remained underwater, and the small expanses of land, separated by seas, were carved into by bays of the now-vanished Tethys Ocean.

Although the Ediacaran fauna are the first mass-produced multicellular organisms, their appearance on Earth dates back to about 600 million (0.6 billion) years ago, at the very end of the Precambrian. However, we know that multicellular organisms appeared on Earth much earlier. These include Grypania from 2.1 billion years ago, interpreted as an algal thallus, and Horodyskia, which appeared between 1.5 and 0.9 billion years ago, sometimes interpreted as a fungus, but sometimes as a bacterial colony.