"Living Fossil" is a science fiction story by American writer L. Sprague de Camp, on the concepts of human extinction and future evolution. It was first published in the magazine Astounding Science-Fiction for February 1939. It first appeared in book form in the anthology A Treasury of Science Fiction (Crown Publishers, 1948); it later appeared in the anthologies Gates to Tomorrow (Atheneum, 1973), and The SFWA Grand Masters, Volume 1 (Tor Books, 1999). The story has been translated into Danish, Swedish and Italian.