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Massive fossilized bones that emerged from slate quarries in Oxfordshire, England beginning in the late 1600s, were immediately obscure.
In a world where evolution and extinction were unknown concepts, experts of the day searched for an explanation. Perhaps, they thought, they belonged to a Roman war elephant or a human giant.
It was not until 1824 that William Buckland, the first professor of geology at the University of Oxford, described and named the first known dinosaur, based on lower jaws, vertebrae and limb bones found in those local quarries. The largest femur was 2 feet, 9 inches long and nearly 10 inches in circumference.
Buckland named the creature with the bones Megalosaurus, or large lizard, in a scientific paper he presented to the newly formed Geological Society of London on February 20, 1824. From the shape of its teeth, he believed it was more of a carnivore. more than 40 feet. (12 meters) long with “the bulk of the elephant.” Buckland thought it was probably an amphibian, living partly in land and water.
“In some ways he got a lot right. It was a group of giant, extinct reptilian creatures.
This was a radical idea,” said Steve Brusatte, a paleontologist at the University of Edinburgh and author of “The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of Their Lost World.”
“We all grew up watching dinosaur cartoons and watching ‘Jurassic Park,’ with dinosaurs on our lunch boxes and toys. But imagine a world where the word dinosaur doesn’t exist, the concept of dinosaur doesn’t exist, and you were the first people to understand this by looking at a few large bones from the earth.”
The word dinosaur did not come into being until 20 years later, coined by the anatomist Richard Owen, founder of the Natural History Museum in London, based on shared characteristics he identified in his studies of Megalosaurus and two other dinosaurs , Iguanodon and Hylaeosaurus, which were first described in 1825 and 1833, respectively.
The Megalosaurus paper cemented Buckland’s professional reputation in the new field of geology, but its importance as the first scientific description of a dinosaur was only seen in hindsight.
At the time, the Megalosaurus was lost in the public imagination when complete fossils of giant marine reptiles such as the ichthyosaur and the plesiosaur were discovered by paleontologist Mary Anning on England’s Dorset Coast. No complete skeleton of Megalasaurus has been found.
But Megalosaurus made its impact on popular culture. Charles Dickens, who was friends with Owen, dreamed of meeting a Megalosaurus on the muddy streets of London at the opening of his 1852 novel, “Bleak House.”
It was one of three dinosaur models exhibited at Crystal Palace in London in 1854, home to the world’s first dinosaur park. It still exists today. Although its head shape is mostly correct, today we know that it was about 6 meters (about 20 feet) long and walked on two legs, not four.
Who was Buckland?
It is unclear how Buckland developed his expertise as a geologist.
An ambitious and energetic scholar, he read classics and theology at Oxford, graduating in 1805, and took a wide variety of classes, including anatomy, said Susan Newell, historian and research associate at the University’s Museum of Natural History. Oxford. He was also in contact with other famous natural scientists of the time such as Charles Cuvier in France, who was famous for his work comparing living animals with fossils.
“He (Buckland) was the first person to start thinking really well, what’s going on with all these strange fossils coming up, just up the road in this quarry in Oxford, and he started paying local quarrymen to find (fossils and) … keep things for him,” Newell said.
“He started putting the jigsaw together.”
A year after the publication of his Megalosaurus paper, Buckland married his unofficial assistant, Mary Morland, who was an accomplished naturalist in her own right and the artist behind the illustrations of Megalosaurus fossils that appeared in the pioneering paper.
Later in his career, Buckland recognized that most of the United Kingdom was once covered by ice sheets after a trip to Switzerland, realizing that a glacial period shaped the British landscape rather than a biblical flood.
Newell said Buckland’s scientific career ended too soon, succumbing to some kind of mental breakdown that stopped him from teaching. He died in 1856 in an asylum in London.
What we have learned
For paleontologists, the 200th anniversary of the first scientific naming of dinosaurs is an opportunity to look back at what the field has learned over the past two centuries.
Because of their departure, dinosaurs were once considered evolutionary failures. In fact, dinosaurs lived and thrived for 165 million years – far longer than the roughly 300,000 years that modern humans have roamed the earth so far.
Today, there are about 1,000 named dinosaur species. And about 50 new dinosaur species are discovered each year, according to Brusatte.
“Actually, science is still in the discovery stage. “Yes, it’s 200 years old now, but we only found a small fraction of the dinosaurs that ever lived,” said Brusatte. “Today’s birds are descendants of dinosaurs. There are (are) over 10,000 species of birds living right now. And of course, dinosaurs lived for over 150 million years. So do the math. There were probably thousands, if not millions, of different species of dinosaurs.”
In the 1990s, fossils discovered in China conclusively showed that dinosaurs had feathers, confirming a long-held theory that they were the direct ancestors of the birds that flap around in the backyard.
It’s not just amazing fossil discoveries that make today the golden age of paleontology. New technology such as CT scanning and computational methods allow paleontologists to reconstruct and understand dinosaurs in much greater detail.
For example, some feather fossils preserve small structures called melanomas that once contained pigment. By comparing the melanomas with those of living birds, scientists can tell the original colors of the feathers.
There is still much to learn. It is not entirely clear how and why dinosaurs became so large, and it is not really known what sounds the creatures could have made.
“I think it’s almost impossible for us to think back to a world where people didn’t know dinosaurs,” Brusatte said.
“However, there will be things in the future where people will say how we didn’t know that in 2024. (This anniversary) should give us a bit of perspective.”
London Natural History Museum and The Geological Society Special events will take place in 2024 to mark the 200th anniversary of the naming of the first dinosaur.
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