Kids love them, and movies have been made about them. Dinosaurs, the ancient beasts that roamed the Earth more than 50 million years ago, are a common fascination for humans today. Yet, it wasn’t until the 19th century that we discovered they actually existed, thanks to the profound insight of a British paleontologist.
Dinosaur fossils had been discovered much earlier, but scientists were unsure what to make of them. While it’s likely that ancient people uncovered dinosaur fossils long ago—there are even Chinese scriptures referencing “dragon bones”—the first officially documented dinosaur fossil is attributed to Reverend Robert Plot. In 1676, he discovered a large thigh bone, which he mistakenly believed belonged to an ancient giant human species.
Many other discoveries of giant fossils occurred in the following centuries, but it wasn’t until 1842 that Richard Owen brought everything together. Owen studied fossilized remains of creatures like Iguanodon, Megalosaurus, and Hylaeosaurus, noticing they shared unique traits: massive size, upright limbs, and distinct skeletal structures. Unlike earlier scientists, who viewed these fossils as unrelated oddities, Owen realized they belonged to a distinct group of ancient reptiles.
With this insight, Richard Owen introduced the term Dinosauria, meaning “terrible lizard,” to describe the newly recognized group of prehistoric reptiles. And the rest is history. Dinosaurs captured the public’s imagination, igniting curiosity about a time when the planet was dominated by gigantic species of reptiles.
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