Florent Lefortier answered
Fossils are very important to the study of dinosaurs – there aren’t any living dinosaurs (other than birds) so without the fossils, we’d know nothing about the creatures at all. We wouldn’t even know they had existed!
Fossils can tell us a lot about a creature. We can use them to find out when the creature lived, what it ate, how it walked, and what it looked like.
When Were Dinosaur Bones First Discovered?
It’s hard to say exactly – we’ve known about them for a while, but it wasn’t until 1842 that Richard Owen coined the term “dinosaur.”
A book written in China during the Jin Dynasty (265-420) mentions the discovery of dragon bones, and this is probably the earliest record of dinosaur discovery that we have. Dinosaur remains in Europe were thought to belong to giants killed by the Great Flood.
The first scholarly documentation of dinosaur bones was in England, towards the end of the 17th century. The fossil was a partial femur bone belonging to a megalosaurus, which was found in Cornwall, England.
Fossils can tell us a lot about a creature. We can use them to find out when the creature lived, what it ate, how it walked, and what it looked like.
When Were Dinosaur Bones First Discovered?
It’s hard to say exactly – we’ve known about them for a while, but it wasn’t until 1842 that Richard Owen coined the term “dinosaur.”
A book written in China during the Jin Dynasty (265-420) mentions the discovery of dragon bones, and this is probably the earliest record of dinosaur discovery that we have. Dinosaur remains in Europe were thought to belong to giants killed by the Great Flood.
The first scholarly documentation of dinosaur bones was in England, towards the end of the 17th century. The fossil was a partial femur bone belonging to a megalosaurus, which was found in Cornwall, England.
