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The huge fossilized bones that emerged from slate quarries in Oxfordshire, England, beginning in the late 17th century were immediately puzzling.
In a world where evolution and extinction were unknown concepts, experts of the time were looking for 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 the lower jaw, vertebrae and limb bones found in those local quarries. The largest thigh bone measured 2 feet 9 inches long and almost 10 inches in circumference.
Buckland named the creature to which the bones belonged Megalosaurus, or great 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 a carnivore. of more than 40 feet. (12 meters) long with “the volume of an elephant”. Buckland thought it was probably amphibious and lived partially on land and water.
“In a way he got a lot of things right. This was a group of extinct giant reptilian creatures.
It 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 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 were the first people to realize this simply by looking at some large bones on earth.”
The word dinosaur did not emerge until 20 years later, coined by 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 described by first time 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 apparent in retrospect.
At the time, Megalosaurus was overshadowed in the public imagination by the discovery of complete fossils of giant marine reptiles such as the ichthyosaur and plesiosaur collected by paleontologist Mary Anning off the coast of Dorset, England. No complete Megalosaurus skeleton has been found.
But Megalosaurus had its impact on popular culture. Charles Dickens, who was a friend of Owen, imagined encountering a megalosaurus on the muddy streets of London in the opening of his 1852 novel, “Bleak House.”
It was also one of three dinosaur models displayed at London’s Crystal Palace in 1854, home of the world’s first dinosaur park. It is still there today. While the shape of its head is largely 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 charismatic scholar, he read classics and theology at Oxford, graduating in 1805 and taking a wide range of classes, including anatomy, said Susan Newell, a historian and research associate at the University of Oxford Museum of Natural History. He was also in contact with other famous natural scientists of the time, such as Charles Cuvier in France, famous for his work comparing living animals with fossils.
“[Buckland]was the first person who really started to think hard about what was going on with all these strange fossils that were turning up right down the street in this quarry in Oxford, and he started paying local quarrymen to find them.” (fossils and) …keep things for himself,” Newell said.
“He started putting the puzzle together.”
A year after the publication of his Megalosaurus article, Buckland married his unofficial assistant, Mary Morland, who was a talented naturalist in her own right and the artist of the illustrations of the Megalosaurus fossils that appeared in the groundbreaking article.
Later in his career, Buckland recognized that most of the United Kingdom was once covered in sheets of ice after a trip to Switzerland, understanding that a period of glaciation had shaped the British landscape rather than a biblical flood.
Newell said Buckland’s scientific career ended prematurely, succumbing to some type of mental crisis that prevented him from teaching. He died in 1856 in a London asylum.
that We have learned
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 demise, dinosaurs were once thought to be evolutionary failures. In fact, dinosaurs survived and thrived for 165 million years, far longer than the roughly 300,000 years that modern humans have roamed the planet so far.
Today around 1,000 species of dinosaurs have been named. And about 50 new species of dinosaurs are discovered every year, according to Brusatte.
“Really, the science is still in the discovery phase. Yes, it is now 200 years old, but we have only found a small fraction of the dinosaurs that have ever existed,” Brusatte said. “Today’s birds are descendants of dinosaurs. There are more than 10,000 species of birds living at this time. And of course, dinosaurs lived for more than 150 million years. Then do the math. “There were probably thousands, if not millions, of different species of dinosaurs.”
In the 1990s, fossils unearthed in China definitively revealed that dinosaurs had feathers, confirming a long-held theory that they are the direct ancestors of backyard birds.
It is not only the surprising fossil discoveries that make this a golden age of paleontology. New technologies, such as computed tomography and computational methods, allow paleontologists to reconstruct and understand dinosaurs in much greater detail.
For example, small structures called melanosomes that once contained pigment are preserved in some feathered fossils. By comparing melanosomes with those of modern birds, scientists can determine possible original feather colors.
There is still a lot to learn. It’s not entirely clear how and why dinosaurs got so big, nor is it really known what noises the creatures might have made.
“I think it’s almost impossible for us to think of a world where people didn’t know about dinosaurs,” Brusatte said.
“However, there will be things in the future where people will say how in 2024 we didn’t know. (This anniversary) should give us a little perspective.”
London Museum of Natural History and The Geological Society will hold special events in 2024 to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the naming of the first dinosaur.
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