Scientists discover 2 million year old skeleton by accident

Scientists are pretty careful, observant people, but that doesn’t mean they won’t accidentally let a discovery sit in a lab for a few years on occasion. In South Africa, researchers discovered a two-million-year-old skeleton, one of the most complete early human ancestors ever found. A find this big must have been the result of painstaking research, right? As lab manager Bonita de Klerk told the Sydney Morning Herald, "It was in packing this [stone] up in the vehicle to go and be scanned that one of our technicians actually noticed a tooth sticking out on the surface and he called [University of Witwatersrand palaeontologist Lee Berger] over and said, 'Oh, I think this is a hominid tooth', and he was right." Maybe we didn’t need to build CERN to find the Higgs boson after all; we just needed to look through the physics department’s trash. [Source]