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Giant fossilized bones that emerged from a slate quarry in Oxfordshire, England, beginning in the late 1600s were immediately puzzling.
In a world where evolution and extinction were unknown concepts, experts at the time flocked from place to place in search of explanations. Perhaps they thought they belonged to something like this. Roman war elephant or giant man.
Not until 1824 William Buckland, Oxford University’s first professor of geology, is credited with describing and naming the first known dinosaur, based on lower jaw, vertebrae, and limb bones found in a local quarry. The largest femur was 2 feet 9 inches long and about 10 inches in circumference.
In a scientific paper submitted to the newly established Geological Society in London on February 20, 1824, Buckland named the bones of this creature Megalosaurus (Great Lizard). Based on the shape of its teeth, they believed it was a carnivore, over 40 feet tall. It is 12 meters long and “as big as an elephant.” Buckland thought it was probably amphibious, living partly on land and partly in water.
“In a way, he got a lot of things right. This was a group of giant extinct reptiles.
“This was a radical idea,” says a paleontologist at the University of Edinburgh.The Rise and Fall of Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World”
“We all grew up watching dinosaur cartoons and Jurassic Park, where dinosaurs appeared on lunch boxes and toys. But the word dinosaur didn’t exist, the concept of dinosaur didn’t exist. , imagine a world where you were the first humans to notice just by looking at some large bones on Earth.”
The word dinosaur was coined 20 years later. A term coined by Richard Owen, an anatomist and founder of the Natural History Museum. They conducted their research in London based on common characteristics they identified in their studies of Megalosaurus and two other dinosaurs, Iguanodon and Hylaeosaurus, first described in 1825 and 1833, respectively.
Although the Megalosaurus paper cemented Bucklund’s professional reputation in the new field of geology, its significance as the first scientific description of a dinosaur only became apparent in retrospect. Ta.
At the time, the discovery of complete fossils of giant marine reptiles such as ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs, collected by paleontologist Mary Anning on England’s Dorset coast, caused Megalosaurus to disappear into the public imagination. Oops. no complete skeleton Megalosaurus was discovered.
However, Megalosaurus influenced popular culture.Owen and his friend Charles Dickens imagined an encounter with a megalosaurus. on the muddy streets of london At the beginning of his 1852 novel The Bleak House.
It was also one of three dinosaur models displayed in London’s Crystal Palace, home of the world’s first dinosaur park, in 1854. It still remains. Its head shape is about right, but today we know it was about 6 meters (about 20 feet) long and walked on two legs instead of four.
Who was Bucklund?
It is not clear how Buckland developed his expertise as a geologist.
Susan Newell, historian and associate research fellow at Oxford University’s Natural History Museum, said he was an ambitious and charismatic scholar who read classics and theology at Oxford University, where he graduated in 1805, and studied a wide range of subjects including anatomy. He said he took the class. He also kept in touch with other prominent natural scientists of the time, such as France’s Charles Cuvier, who was famous for his work comparing living animals and fossils.
“[Buckland]was the first person to really start thinking about what was going on with these strange fossils that were coming up right off the road in this quarry in Oxford. I started paying a local quarry company to find me (and) to keep things for him,” Newell said.
“He started putting together a jigsaw puzzle.”
A year after the Megalosaurus paper was published, Buckland married his unofficial assistant. Mary Morland was a talented naturalist In her own right, she is also the artist behind the illustrations of Megalosaurus fossils published in the landmark paper.
Late in his career, Backlund realized that; Much of Britain was once covered in ice sheets After a trip to Switzerland, I realized that the Ice Age, not the Biblical Flood, shaped the British landscape.
Mr Newell said Mr Buckland’s career as a scientist ended prematurely and he suffered some kind of mental breakdown which left him unable to pursue a teaching career. He died in a London asylum in his 1856.
For paleontologists, the 200th anniversary of the first scientific naming of dinosaurs is an opportunity to look back and reflect on what the field has learned over the past two centuries.
Dinosaurs were defined by their extinction and were once considered an evolutionary failure. In fact, dinosaurs lived and thrived for 165 million years. This is much longer than the approximately 300,000 years that modern humans have roamed the Earth.
Currently, approximately 1,000 species of dinosaurs have been named. And about 50 new dinosaur species are discovered every year, Brusatte said.
“In fact, science is still in the discovery phase. Yes, it’s been 200 years now, and only a few dinosaurs have been discovered so far,” Brusatte said. “Today’s birds are descendants of dinosaurs. There are over 10,000 species of birds living today. And, of course, dinosaurs lived for well over 150 million years. So do the math. There were probably thousands, if not millions, of different types of dinosaurs.”
Fossils unearthed in China in the 1990s conclusively demonstrated that dinosaurs had feathers, confirming the long-held theory that dinosaurs were the direct ancestors of backyard birds.
It’s not just the amazing fossil discoveries that make this a golden age for paleontology. New technologies such as CT scans and computational techniques have enabled paleontologists to reconstruct and understand dinosaurs in greater detail.
For example, some fossilized feathers preserve small structures called melanosomes that once contained pigment. By comparing the melanosomes to those of living birds, scientists can estimate the original color of the feathers.
There is still much to learn. It’s not entirely clear how and why dinosaurs got so big, and we don’t actually know what noises they made.
“I think it’s almost impossible to remember a world where people didn’t know about dinosaurs,” Brusatte said.
“But in the future, something will happen where in 2024 we’ll say, why didn’t we know about that? (This anniversary) should give us a little bit of perspective.”
of london natural history museum and geological society A special event will be held in 2024 to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the naming of the first dinosaur..