190 years. That's about how long it has been since Austin was settled. The city started as Waterloo in 1837 and was renamed Austin in 1839 — the same year it became the capital of Texas.

All things considered, it's a young city. To put it in perspective, Paris became the capital of France in the year 987, Oslo was established in 1049, and Mexico City was founded in 1325.

Despite the city's youth, you can still find some pretty old things in Austin. Let's take a peek at some really old stuff you can see in town.

The Onion Creek Mosasaur rivaled the size of the terrifying T. Rex. | Photo by Larry D. Moore via OpenVerse

Onion Creek Mosasaur | Prehistoric

An enormous, 30-to-50-ft water lizard called a Mosasaur once roamed the waters (up to 600 ft deep) of Central Texas in the late Cretaceous period. Its skeleton, discovered at Onion Creek by UT geology students in 1934, had sharp teeth and a jaw that could open nearly three ft. You can see it for yourself displayed in the Texas Science & Natural History Museum.

This plate is over 2,000 years old than Austin. | Photo courtesy of the Blanton Museum of Art

Red-Figure Apulian Plate | 340–320 BCE
Found in Apulia in southwestern Italy, this plate is decorated with fish from the Adriatic Sea and features a depression in the middle to hold sauces or juice. In ancient Greece, wealthy people's everyday objects were highly decorated to enhance the ambiance of their meals.

Admission to the Harry Ransom Center is free, and the Gutenberg Bible is always on display. | Photo courtesy of the Harry Ransom Center

Gutenberg Bible | ~1454-1456
Acquired by the Harry Ransom Center in 1978, the Gutenberg Bible in Austin is one of 20 complete copies in the world. It's one of the first books ever to be mass-produced using a movable type — aka a printing press. It is completely digitized and always on display.

There are 233 surviving copies of the First Folio, and three are held at the Harry Ransom Center. | Photo courtesy of the Harry Ransom Center Book Collection

The Pforzheimer First Folio | 1623
William Shakespeare’s "Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies," otherwise known as the First Folio, would have cost £1 when it was first printed and was considered a luxury. It features 36 of Shakespeare's plays, many of which had yet to be printed, and three of four copies in Texas are housed in the Harry Ransom Center's collection.

The statue is small and would have been meant to be placed on a table for devotion in the hgome. | Photo courtesy of the Blanton Museum of Art

The Education of the Virgin | 1689–1706
Luisa Roldán, the earliest documented female sculptor in Spain, created this statue of the young Virgin Mary — before she gave birth to Jesus — out of painted terracotta. Mary kneels to lean over her mother, Saint Anne, while reading, and her father, Saint Joachim, sits on the other side. The subject may have been particularly special to Roldán, who was taught to sculpt by her father.

This heliograph took days to produce through the camera obscura. | Photo courtesy of the Harry Ransom Center Gernsheim Collection

Niépce Heliograph | 1827
The oldest surviving photograph made with a camera obscura, the Niépce Heliograph was captured by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce in Burgundy, France. It's hard to make out, but the pewter plate it is captured on shows a courtyard, surrounding buildings, and trees. It took several days of sunlight exposure to capture and was an essential precursor to the Daguerreotype.

Which ancient artifacts do you think should be on this list? Drop us a line.