The first finds
Before
Richard Owen
introduced the term Dinosauria in 1842, there was no concept of anything even like a dinosaur. Large fossilized bones quite probably had been observed long before that time, but there is little record?and no existing specimens?of such findings much before 1818. In any case, people could not have been expected to understand what dinosaurs were even if they found their remains. For example, some classical scholars now conclude that the Greco-Roman
legends
of
griffins
from the 7th century
bce
were inspired by discoveries of
protoceratopsian
dinosaurs in the
Altai
region of
Mongolia
. In 1676 Robert Plot of the
University of Oxford
included, in a work of natural history, a drawing of what was apparently the knee-end of the
thighbone
of a dinosaur, which he thought might have come from an elephant taken to Britain in Roman times. Fossil bones of what were undoubtedly dinosaurs were discovered in
New Jersey
in the late 1700s and were probably discussed at the meetings of the
American Philosophical Society
in Philadelphia. Soon thereafter,
Lewis and Clark’s expedition
encountered
dinosaur fossils in the western
United States
.
The earliest verifiable published record of dinosaur remains that still exists is a note in the 1820
American Journal of Science and Arts
by Nathan Smith. The bones described had been found in 1818 by Solomon Ellsworth, Jr., while he was digging a well at his homestead in Windsor, Connecticut. At the time, the bones were thought to be
human
, but much later they were identified as
Anchisaurus
. Even earlier (1800), large birdlike footprints had been noticed on sandstone slabs in Massachusetts. Pliny Moody, who discovered these tracks, attributed them to “Noah’s raven,” and Edward Hitchcock of
Amherst College
, who began collecting them in 1835, considered them to be those of some giant extinct
bird
. The tracks are now recognized as having been made by several different kinds of dinosaurs, and such tracks are still commonplace in the
Connecticut River
valley today.
Better known are the finds in southern England during the early 1820s by
William Buckland
(a clergyman) and
Gideon Mantell
(a physician), who described
Megalosaurus
and
Iguanodon
, respectively. In 1824 Buckland published a description of
Megalosaurus
, fossils of which consisted mainly of a lower jawbone with a few
teeth
. The following year Mantell published his “Notice on the
Iguanodon
, a Newly Discovered Fossil Reptile, from the Sandstone of Tilgate Forest, in Sussex,” on the basis of several teeth and some leg bones. Both men collected fossils as an avocation and are
credited
with the earliest published announcements in England of what later would be recognized as dinosaurs. In both cases their finds were too fragmentary to permit a clear image of either animal. In 1834 a partial
skeleton
was found near
Brighton
that corresponded with Mantell’s fragments from Tilgate Forest. It became known as the
Maidstone
Iguanodon
, after the village where it was discovered. The Maidstone skeleton provided the first glimpse of what these creatures might have looked like.
Two years before the Maidstone
Iguanodon
came to light, a different kind of skeleton was found in the
Weald
of southern England. It was described and named
Hylaeosaurus
by Mantell in 1832 and later proved to be one of the armoured dinosaurs. Other fossil bones began turning up in Europe: fragments described and named as
Thecodontosaurus
and
Palaeosaurus
by two English students, Henry Riley and Samuel Stutchbury, and the first of many skeletons named
Plateosaurus
by the naturalist Hermann von Meyer in 1837.
Richard Owen
identified two additional dinosaurs,
albeit
from fragmentary evidence:
Cladeiodon
, which was based on a single large tooth, and
Cetiosaurus
, which he named from an incomplete skeleton composed of very large bones. Having carefully studied most of these fossil specimens, Owen recognized that all of these bones represented a group of large reptiles that were unlike any living varieties. In a report to the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1841, he described these animals, and the word Dinosauria was first published in the association’s proceedings in 1842.