Dinosaur: Encyclopedia II - Dinosaur - History of discovery

Dinosaur - History of discovery

Dinosaur fossils have been known of for millennia, although their true nature was not recognized; the Chinese considered them to be dragon bones, while Europeans believed them to be the remains of giants and other creatures killed by the Great Flood.

The first dinosaur species to be identified and named was Iguanodon, which was discovered in 1822 by the English geologist Gideon Mantell, who recognized similarities between his fossils and the bones of modern iguanas.

Two years later, the Rev William Buckland, a professor of geology at Oxford University, became the first person to describe a dinosaur Megalosaurus bucklandii, found near Oxford in a scientific journal.

The study of these "great fossil lizards" soon became of great interest to European and American scientists, and in 1842 the English paleontologist Richard Owen coined the term "dinosaur" (See above). He recognized that the remains that had been found so far, Iguanodon, Megalosaurus and Hylaeosaurus, all had a number of features in common, and so decided to present them as a distinct taxonomic group. With the backing of Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, the husband of Queen Victoria, Owen established the Natural History Museum in South Kensington, London, to display the national collection of dinosaur fossils and other biological and geological exhibits.

In 1858, the first known American dinosaur was discovered in marl pits in the small town of Haddonfield, New Jersey (although fossils had been found before, their nature had not been correctly discerned). The creature was named Hadrosaurus foulkii, after the town and the discoverer, William Parker Foulke. It was an extremely important find; Hadrosaurus was the first nearly complete dinosaur skeleton found and it was clearly a bipedal creature. This was a revolutionary discovery, as until that point most scientists had believed dinosaurs walked on four feet like other lizards. Foulke's discoveries sparked a wave of dinosaur mania in the United States.

Dinosaur mania was exemplified by the fierce rivalry between Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh, both of whom raced to be the first to find new dinosaurs in what came to be known as the Bone Wars. The feud probably originated when Marsh publicly criticized Cope for putting the bones of an Elastomosaurus on back to front. The fight between the two scientists lasted for over 30 years, and only ended in 1897 when Cope died after spending his entire fortune on the dinosaur hunt. Marsh won the contest by the virtue of his better funding through the US Geological Survey. Unfortunately, many potentially valuable dinosaur specimens were damaged or destroyed due to the pair's rough methods; for example, their diggers often used dynamite to unearth bones a method most modern paleontologist would find sacrilegious. Despite the pair's unrefined methods, their contributions to paleontology were vast; Marsh unearthed 86 new species of dinosaur and Cope discovered 56, in total 142 new species. Cope's collection is now at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, while Marsh's is on display at the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale University.^[36]

Since 1897, the search for dinosaurs fossils has extended to every continent, including Antarctica. The first Antarctic dinosaur to be discovered, was the nodosaurid Ankylosaurus, which was found on Ross Island in 1986, although it was 1994 before an Antarctic dinosaur, the Cryolophosaurus ellioti, was formally named and described in a scientific journal.

Current dinosaur "hot spots" include southern South America (especially Argentina) and China. China in particular has produced many exceptional feathered dinosaur specimens due to the unique geology of its dinosaur beds, as well as its historically arid climate which is conductive to fossilization process.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "History of discovery", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki