The first dinosaurs to be named
People had been finding giant bones for centuries, and some thought they came from dragons or giants. In 1824 the English geologist William Buckland described a jaw with curved, serrated teeth from a quarry in Oxfordshire and named its owner Megalosaurus, the first DINOSAUR to be given a scientific name. In 1842 the scientist Richard Owen realised that these creatures belonged to a group of their own and invented the word dinosaur, from Greek words meaning terrible lizard.
In 1854, life-sized sculptures of dinosaurs were unveiled in the park at Crystal Palace in south London, and they are still there. To celebrate, twenty-one scientists and guests ate a dinner inside the mould of one of them, an Iguanodon. The sculptures got plenty wrong, including a thumb spike placed on the Iguanodon's nose.
Not every giant reptile was a dinosaur
The flying PTERODACTYL and its relatives, the pterosaurs, were not dinosaurs, although they lived at the same time; nor were the great swimming reptiles of the ancient seas. Dinosaurs were land animals with legs held straight under their bodies. Birds, on the other hand, are dinosaurs, as our birds page explains.
Dinosaurs lived over such a long span that some were further apart in time than we are from them. STEGOSAURUS lived about 150 million years ago, and Tyrannosaurus rex only about 68 to 66 million years ago, so T. rex lived closer in time to us than to Stegosaurus. The name JURASSIC comes from the Jura Mountains on the border of France and Switzerland, where rocks from that period were first studied.
The name that came back from the dead
In 1879 the American fossil hunter Othniel Marsh named a huge long-necked dinosaur BRONTOSAURUS, thunder lizard. In 1903 another scientist decided it was really the same animal as one Marsh had already called Apatosaurus, and the older name won; for decades books said Brontosaurus never existed. Then in 2015 a large study of the bones concluded that the two were different enough after all, and Brontosaurus was brought back.
Marsh spent years in a bitter rivalry with Edward Cope, known as the Bone Wars, in which each paid spies, smashed fossils to stop the other having them and rushed to name new species, sometimes naming the same one twice. Between them they named well over a hundred.
Eggs and a misnamed mother
The first dinosaur EGG nests to be recognised were found in the Gobi Desert in Mongolia in 1923. A skeleton lying on one nest was named Oviraptor, egg thief, because scientists assumed it was stealing the eggs. Decades later, another fossil showed that it had actually been sitting on its own eggs to keep them warm, like a bird.
Famous skeletons
Some skeletons are famous in their own right. A T. rex nicknamed Sue, found in South Dakota in 1990, sold at auction in 1997 for more than eight million dollars. Casts of a DIPLODOCUS called Dippy were given to museums around the world by the businessman Andrew Carnegie in the early 1900s. A FOSSIL CLAW, TAIL and SCALES tell scientists whether an animal was a HERBIVORE or a CARNIVORE, and the VELOCIRAPTOR's real size is on our Jurassic Park page.