The First Dinosaur Fossil

The first dinosaur fossil documented by a scientist was 350 years ago, in 1677.

It was part of a femur discovered in a shale mine in England, then sent to a local museum. The curator had never seen anything like it.

He thought it must be a thigh bone from a war elephant, from some ancient battle. Or the femoral head of a giant human, as described in the Bible.

At any rate, he published an illustration in his natural history of the area, but no one thought much of it.

One hundred and fifty years later, in 1824, Oxford University’s first geologist studied more fossils that had been found in English canals and quarries and concluded they came from an extinct giant reptile species. He named it Megalosaurus, “great lizard.”

He presented his findings to the Geological Society of London, and Megalosaurus entered the fossil record.

This triggered a fossil rush, and soon amateurs and professionals alike were finding more bones.

That’s when, in 1841, another scientist realized there were a host of these ancient creatures, which he dubbed “dinosaurs” after the Greek deinós for terrible, and saûros for lizard.

Since then, paleontologists have found dinosaurs far more “megalo” than Megalosaurus, which, it turns out, was an early theropod about half the size of T. rex.

But Megalosaurus started it all; the birth of a field that still fascinates humans 200 years later.