Sign up for CNN’s Wonder Theory science newsletter. Explore the universe with news about fascinating discoveries, scientific advancements and more.
The massive fossilized bones that emerged from slate quarries in Oxfordshire, England, starting in the late 1600s were immediately puzzling.
In a world where evolution and extinction were unknown concepts, experts of the time took action to find an explanation. Perhaps they thought they belonged to a Roman war elephant or a giant human.
It was not until 1824 that William Buckland, Oxford University’s first professor of geology, described and named the first known dinosaur, based on lower jaw, vertebra and limb bones found in local quarries. The largest femur was 2 feet, 9 inches long and about 10 inches in circumference.
In his scientific paper presented to the newly formed Geological Society of London on February 20, 1824, Buckland described the creature as saying that the bones belonged to Megalosaurus, or large lizard. Judging by the shape of its teeth, he believed it was a carnivore over 12 meters long. (12 meters) long and “the size of an elephant.” Buckland thought it was probably amphibious because it lived partly on land and in water.
“In some ways he was right about a lot of things. This was a group of extinct giant 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,’ where we had dinosaurs in our lunchboxes and toys. But imagine a world where the word dinosaur does not exist, where the concept of dinosaur does not exist, and you are the first people to notice this by looking at a few large bones on earth.”
The word dinosaur did not appear until 20 years later; It was coined by anatomist Richard Owen, founder of the Natural History Museum in London, based on common features he identified in his studies of Megalosaurus and two other dinosaurs, Iguanodon and Hylaeosaurus. They were first described in 1825 and 1833 respectively.
The Megalosaurus paper established Buckland’s professional reputation in the new field of geology, but its importance as the first scientific description of a dinosaur was apparent only in hindsight.
At the time, Megalosaurus had been eclipsed in the public imagination by the discovery of complete fossils of giant marine reptiles such as ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs collected by paleontologist Mary Anning on England’s Dorset Coast. A complete skeleton of Megalosaurus has not been found.
However, Megalosaurus had an impact on popular culture. Charles Dickens, who was friends with Owen, imagined encountering a Megalosaurus in the muddy streets of London at the opening of his 1852 novel “Bleak House.”
It was also one of three model dinosaurs exhibited at the Crystal Palace in London, home to the world’s first dinosaur park, in 1854. It’s still there today. While the head shape is largely correct, today we know that it was about 6 meters (about 20 feet) tall and walked on two legs rather than four.
Who was Buckland?
It is not clear how Buckland developed his expertise as a geologist.
An ambitious and charismatic academic, he studied classics and theology at Oxford, graduating in 1805, and took a wide range of courses, including anatomy, said Susan Newell, a historian and associate researcher at the University of Oxford’s Museum of Natural History. He was also in contact with other famous naturalists of the time, such as Charles Cuvier in France, famous for his work comparing living animals to fossils.
“(Buckland) was the first one to really start thinking hard, what was going on with these strange fossils turning up just up the road in this quarry in Oxford, and started paying local quarrymen to find (the fossils and) … hide something for him,” said Newell.
“He started putting the pieces of the puzzle together.”
A year after the Megalosaurus paper was published, Buckland married his unofficial assistant Mary Morland, a talented naturalist in her own right and the artist of the drawings of Megalosaurus fossils that appeared in the groundbreaking paper.
Later in his career, after a trip to Switzerland, Buckland realized that much of the United Kingdom had once been covered by ice sheets and realized that a period of glaciation rather than a biblical flood had shaped the British landscape.
Buckland’s scientific career ended prematurely, Newell said, and he succumbed to a kind of mental breakdown that prevented him from teaching. He died in a London mental hospital in 1856.
What did we learn?
For paleontologists, the 200th anniversary of the first scientific naming of a dinosaur is an opportunity to take stock and look back at what the field has learned over the past two centuries.
Defined by their extinction, dinosaurs were once thought to be evolutionary failures. In fact, dinosaurs survived and thrived for 165 million years; This is much longer than the roughly 300,000 years that modern humans have been roaming the planet so far.
Today, approximately 1000 dinosaur species have been named. According to Brusatte, approximately 50 new dinosaur species are discovered every year.
“Actually, science is still in the discovery phase. Yes, it’s 200 years old now, but we’ve only found a tiny fraction of the dinosaurs that have ever lived,” Brusatte said. “Today’s birds are the descendants of dinosaurs. More than 10,000 bird species are currently alive. And of course, dinosaurs lived for more than 150 million years. Mathematics “There were probably thousands, if not millions, of different dinosaur species.”
Fossils unearthed in China in the 1990s conclusively revealed that dinosaurs had feathers, confirming the long-held theory that dinosaurs were direct ancestors of backyard flapping birds.
It’s not just surprising fossil discoveries that make today the golden age of paleontology. New technologies such as computed tomography scanning and computational methods allow paleontologists to reconstruct and understand dinosaurs in much greater detail.
For example, some feathered fossils preserve tiny structures called melanosomes that once contained pigment. By comparing melanosomes with those of living birds, scientists can tell the possible original colors of the feathers.
There is still much to learn. Just as it is not entirely clear how and why dinosaurs grew so large, it is also not known exactly what kind of sounds the creatures made.
“I think it’s almost impossible for us to rethink a world where people didn’t know dinosaurs,” Brusatte said.
“But there will be things in the future that people will say in 2024, how did we not know that? (This anniversary) should give us some perspective.”
of london Natural History Museum And Geological Society Special events will be held in 2024 to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the naming of the first dinosaur.
For more CNN news and newsletters, create an account at CNN.com