A Short History of
Dinosaur Paleontology
Dinosaurs did not exist as
such in the minds of
humans until the early
1800’s. Prior to this time,
a few dinosaur bones had likely been
discovered, but they were not
recognized as belonging to extinct
animals.
Records of ‘dragon bones’ found
in the Sichuan province of China
(where dinosaur bones are
abundant) date back almost to
the birth of Christ.
Protoceratops fossil, Mongolia
Native Americans
were familiar with fossil dinosaur bones.
The Sioux believed dinosaur
fossils to be the bones of giant
serpents that had burrowed
into the Earth and were hunted
and killed by the Great Spirit.
Europeans
At first did not recognize dinosaur
fossils for what they were.
“Fossil” comes from the Latin
meaning “dug up” - originally
referred to any unusual stony
object.
The fact that fossils are the
remains of dead and extinct
animals was not widely
accepted until the late 1600’s.
Robert Plot
(1640-1696)
End of a femur Megalosaurus?
• 1676 - Plot described
and catalogued a "a real
bone now petrified"
which was probably
dinosaurian.
• Plot thought it a femur
from a giant human or
from an elephant
brought over when the
Romans occupied Britain.
• It was labeled as the
lower part of a thigh
bone and later
recaptioned Scrotum
Humanum by R. Brooks.
Pliny Moody (1787)
Connecticut farmer who discovered
bird-like footprints preserved in rock
on his farm in the Connecticut valley.
William Clark (1806)
“Dureing the time the men were getting the two big
horns which I had killed to the river I employed my self
in getting pieces of the rib of a fish which was
Semented within the face of a rock rib (about 3) inches
in Secumpherence about the middle it is 3 feet in length
tho a part of the end appears to have been broken off
(the fallen rock is near the water - the face of the rock
where the rib is perpendr 4 I lengthwise, a little barb
projects I have several pieces of this rib the bone is
nether decayed nor petrified but very rotten.”
Late 1700’s - early 1800’s
Industrial Revolution
• Europeans were digging into the earth and
quarrying.
• Coal was being mined, gypsum and building
stone was being quarried, railroads and canals
were being dug.
• Europeans were uncovering and moving a lot of
rock and in doing so they found fossils.
Tertiary
Secondary
Flood Gravels
Layers composed of
unconsolidated sediment
Hard rock layers with
abundant fossils
Transitional
Hard rock layers with
sparse fossils
Trans.
Primary
Crystalline rock
Second
ary
Primary
Tertiary
ary
post-Diluvial
Diluvial
Earth History, 1700’s
Second
circa 1790
Fossil Reptiles
Giant fossil reptiles were
being found in the upper part
of the Secondary rock layers.
Georges Cuvier
(1769-1832)
•French comparative zoologist
•Expert on vertebrate skeletons
•Studied vertebrate remains being
excavated from secondary and
tertiary strata in the Paris Basin.
•Proved extinction.
•Published “Discourse on the
revolutions of the surface of the
globe”.
Cuvier proved that some
species were definitely
extinct by comparing fossil
and modern elephant bones.
Mammoth
Elephant
American Mastodon
Reconstructed by Cuvier
Cuvier showed that the bones of animals being found
in the secondary strata were from giant reptiles.
Mosasaur jaw being excavated from the chalk at
Maestricht, Holland
Late 1700’s.
Cuvier’s Mosasaur skull
circa 1790
circa 1870
British Isles
post-Diluvial
Diluvial
Tertiary
Continental Europe
Cuvier proved the
gravels
existence of
Sicilian strata
Unusual mammals
several unique
London clay
Parisian gypsum beds
ages in the history
Parisian chalk
English chalk
of the Earth prior
Extinct fish and
Oolites
Jura Mt. strata
Lias
to the appearance
reptiles
New Red Sandstone
Muschelkalk - Trias
of humankind.
Magnesian Limestone Perm strata
Modern mammals
alluvium
Quaternary
Tertiary
Cretaceous
Secondary
Jurassic
Triassic
Permian
Transitional
Coal Measures
Mountain Limestone
Shelly fossils,
Old Red Sandstone
Devonshire strata
but no
Wenlock Limestone
vertebrates
Welsh Greywackes
Carboniferous
Devonian
Silurian
Ordovician
Cambrian
Primary
No fossils
Crystalline (metamorphic) strata
Precambrian
The “Fossilists”
19th century Europeans who collected fossils for study,
as a hobby, or for profit.
Dean William Buckland
(1784-1856)
•Oxford professor
•Avid fossilist
•Described the first Mesozoic
mammal ever found.
•Eccentric but enthusiastic
lecturer.
•Tried to reconcile geology with
biblical scripture.
•Described Megalosaurus - the
first dinosaur found in Great
Britain.
Lower jaw of Megalosaurus
- described by Sir William Buckland in Notice on
the Megalosaurus or Great Fossil Lizard of Stonesfield
Dr. Gideon Mantell
(1790-1852)
•English physician
•Avid fossilist
•Described Iguanodon - the
first herbivorous dinosaur
found.
•Described Hylaeosaurus - the
first armored dinosaur found.
Gideon Mantell
Iguanodon teeth figured
by Mantell
Iguanodon bones and
restoration figured by
Mantell
Mrs. Mantell
Hylaeosaurus fossils
Hylaeosaurus
Mary Anning
(1799-1847)
•Collector of marine reptiles
along southern coast of
England.
•Sold specimens to
gentlemen fossilists.
•Expert, frequently
consulted by Buckland, but
never acknowledged
professionally.
•Poor and female (double
whammy).
•
Anning discovered many
new ichthyosaur species
and the first known
plesiosaur.
Sir Richard Owen
(1804-1892)
•The English Cuvier.
•zoologist who did not stoop to
collect fossils himself.
• In 1841 he wrote a study
reviewing all three of the giant,
extinct, terrestrial fossil
reptiles known so far.
•Showed these animals had
certain skeletal features in
common, and different from
living lizards.
•proposed a new group of
extinct reptiles - Dinosauria
(“fearful reptiles”) for this
group.
Owen’s Dinosauria
Owen’s Dinosauria
Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins
1807-1889
Artist
Sculptor
Naturalist
Crystal Palace Exhibition, 1854
Dino-mania Victorian Style!
Megalosaurus
Iguanodon
Megalosaurus
reconstruction
Photograph by Colin Gregory Palmer
Megalosaurus reconstruction, circa 1854
Joseph Leidy
1823-1891
•Professor of anatomy,
University of Pennsylvania.
•1854, Ferdinand Hayden
exploring the Nebraska
Territory collected large teeth
of two fossil animals.
•1855 sent teeth, similar to
Iquanodon and Megalosaurus, to
Leidy who described the teeth
and named them - Trachodon
and Troodon giving America its
first officially recognized
dinosaurs.
William Parker Foulke
(1858)
•Farmer in Haddonfield, NJ
discovers several large
bones while digging on his
farm.
•Excavations reveal the most
complete dinosaur yet
known in the world.
•Joseph Leidy studied the
remains, which revealed a
large, kangaroo-like animal
he named Hadrosaurus
foulkii.
The Haddonfield Hadrosaurus
Hadrosaurus sculpture
Joseph Leidy
Hadrosaurus foulkii
Hadrosaurus diagram
Hadrosaurus foulkii
Edward Hitchcock (mid-1800’s)
• President and Professor of Natural
Theology and Geology, Amherst College
• Connecticut Valley
• Footprints of “Ancient Birds”
Edward Drinker Cope
•American paleontologist,
(1840-1897)
herptologist, ichthyologist,
anatomist
•Born in 1840 to a well-off
merchant family in Philadelphia.
•Cope published his first scientific
paper at the age of 18, as a
student of Joseph Leidy.
•Self-employed most of his life worked under the auspices of
several government surveys of
the western U.S.
Charles Othniel Marsh • Born in Lockport, New York in 1831
to a poor farming family.
(1831-1899)
• His uncle was millionaire George
Peabody.
• Peabody funded his education from
boarding school to Yale, to studies in
Europe.
• Endowment to Yale established a
natural history museum (the Yale
Peabody Museum) where Marsh was
to be an endowed professor of
paleontology.
• Stolid and imperious, Marsh never
married and had few friends.
THE
WAR
• Cope and Marsh had a “falling out” over
Cope’s reconstruction of a plesiosaur.
• They became bitter rivals.
• Marsh organized his first expedition to the West in
1870.
• In 1872 Cope infringes on Marsh’s “turf” in Wyoming.
• 1877 - large dinosaur deposits found in Morrison,
Colorado and Cuomo, Wyoming.
Marsh
The race was on.
Cope and Marsh
battled one-another in
the field and in print
until the end of their
lives.
The Cope and Marsh rivalry brought 1000’s of new
species of dinosaurs and other extinct animals to
light.
• Marsh is credited with the discovery of more than a
thousand fossil vertebrates and the description of at least
500 more, including major works on toothed birds, gigantic
horned mammals, and North American dinosaurs.
• Cope published over 1,200 books and papers! Although he
described many dinosaurs, his greatest achievements were
his studies of fossil mammals from the Tertiary Period and
his zoological studies of birds and reptiles.
• Marsh and Cope trained the next generation of vertebrate
paleontologists.
• Marsh’s fossils are in the Yale Peabody Museum.
• Cope sold most of his collections to the American Museum
of Natural History to pay his debts later in life.
Stegosaurus ungulatus (Marsh)
Brontosaurus excelsus (Marsh) - now Apatosaurus
Wrong head!
Henry Fairfield Osborn (1857 - 1935)
Curator and President of the American Museum of Natural
History
• Student of Cope
• Led museum expeditions to
Como Bluff, Wyoming and
Alberta, Canada in search
of dinosaurs.
• Authorized and funded
expeditions to Mongolia.
• Hired a legendary team of
fossil collectors, including
Charles Sternberg, Barnum
Brown and Roy Chapman
Andrews.
Fossil collecting at
Cuomo Bluff
Expedition to badlands of Alberta, Canada
Barnum Brown excavates first Tyrannosaurus rex
in 1902.
Roy Chapman
Andrews
(1884 - 1960)
• Zoologist hired by Osborn at
the AMNH.
• Led three expeditions to
China, Burma, and Mongolia
from 1916 - 1925.
• Discovered first dinosaur eggs,
first bird-like dinosaurs, and
largest known fossil mammal.
• First expeditions to use motor
cars.
Charles R. Knight
•Natural history artist
•Created realistic reconstructions of dinosaurs and
other extinct animals.
Illustrations by
Charles R. Knight
Knight’s illustrations greatly influenced how the public
and scientists alike viewed dinosaurs.
Giant Kangaroo!
1930’s to 1960’s - Dinosaurs fade into obscurity.
• Viewed as an evolutionary dead end and as “failures”.
• Origin and evolution of mammals more interesting.
• Dinosaur fossils are relatively rare.
Late 1960’s - Dinosaur renaissance begins.
John Ostrom
Robert Bakker
Sinosauropteryx - first feathered
dinosaur, discovered in China, 1998.