When Were Dinosaurs Discovered?

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When Were Dinosaurs Discovered?

3 Answers

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Answer 1

Dinosaurs were present on this Earth for more than 200 million years, but no one had ever heard of them until 1841 simply because there was no name or definition of them as a group of fossils.

This was 165 years after the first published illustration of a dinosaur bone and many years after the first dinosaur was named and described.

How Dinosaurs Got Their Name Dinosauria, comes from deinos, the Greek for "terrible" and sauros, Greek for "lizard". Most fossils are now named in this way part Greek part Latin. The term "Dinosaur" was first coined by Sir Richard Owen.

Answer 2

The first ever dinosaur discovery in the world was initially made in the US. And the discovery was made by Dr. Caspar Wistar, who actually found a thigh bone in Gloucester County, New Jersey, in the year 1787.

Other Early Dinosaur Discoveries

In 1800 in Massachusetts, USA, Pliny Moody found 1-foot long trace of footprints at his farm-house Harvard and Yale scholars thought that the footprints belonged to "Noah's Raven."
A number of other dinosaur footprints were discovered in New England stone quarries and that was also in the early 1800s, but initially they were thought to be of no importance and were put away or ignored in the quarrying process.
Other incomplete dinosaur bones and tracks were unearthed at this time in Connecticut Valley, Massachusetts.
The first ever almost-completed dinosaur skeleton was discovered by William Parker Foulke. Foulke had heard about the news of a discovery made by workmen in Cretaceous marl which was actually of a crumbly type of soil pit on the John E. Hopkins farm in Haddonfield, New Jersey and this incident happened in the beginning of 1838. Foulke heard of the discovery and realized its real worth twenty years later in 1858. Unfortunately, most of the discoveries were already taken away by working men.

Answer 3

It was Sir Richard Owen who found some of the first dinosaur fossils in 1842. They were teeth.

They were pretty big too. He studied many types of animals and was pretty sure that these teeth did not belong to any living animal today. He did however think it was similar to a lizard's tooth. So he named the dinosaurs. This discovery caused many others to be curious and they to began looking for dinosaurs.

Other fossils may have been found earlier that 1842, but the name "dinosaur" was not given until 1842.