It was the year when the solar system's second favourite planet was voted out of existence, and when the missing link between fish and land animals was found. It was also the year when the spectre of global warming became ever more alarming but where mathematicians and medics hailed the solution of a century-old puzzle and the world's first cancer vaccine respectively. The SCMP looks at its five top scientific events of the year.
1 Pluto is cast out by the planets club
It was a decision that provoked unexpected outrage and tears from millions of children as their parents broke the news to them that the 'little Pluto' that ends the kindergarten ditty 'let's sing about our nine planets' is officially no longer a planet.
Little Pluto, it turned out, was just too little to last. It was demoted in August by the 2,500-member International Astronomical Union from ninth planet to the humiliating title of pluton or 'dwarf planet' - essentially just another rock drifting out in a void of space called the Kuiper Belt.
This was a story that transcended science. There were protest songs, T-shirts, bumper stickers and a global internet campaign for the reinstatement of the faraway rock discovered only in 1930 but which quickly took a firm hold of the popular imagination and even had a Disney character named after it.
The protests were less about logic than our sense of fair play. Everyone loved Pluto because it was the little outsider, the baby of the solar system, the plucky little survivor clinging on to the edge of our known solar system.