Читать книгу Dinosaurs - Douglas Palmer - Страница 16

The first dinosaur fossils were probably found in China many hundreds of years ago, when they were thought to be dragon bones. In modern times it was the early 19th-century discovery of some puzzling fossil bones in the south of England that really started the dinosaur story. In the 1820s, a large 25cm-long (10in) jawbone set with sharp, blade-shaped teeth excavated from Jurassic strata in Oxfordshire was described by William Buckland as Megalosaurus, a new kind of giant and extinct reptile. Around the same time, Gideon Mantell was trying to reconstruct another large fossil reptile that he called Iguanodon from a jumble of bones found in Sussex.

But both Buckland and Mantell were trounced by anatomist Richard Owen, who was the first to distinguish and name the Dinosauria (meaning ‘terrible lizard’) as an extinct group of reptiles in 1842. Owen realized that both Megalosaurus and Iguanodon had features that distinguished them as dinosaurs. For the reopening of Crystal Palace in south London in 1853, Owen and the sculptor Waterhouse Hawkins built the first life-sized dinosaur models, which still exist at the site today. They saw Megalosaurus and Iguanodon as huge, lumbering, four-legged and rather elephantine beasts with massive tails.

By the end of the 19th century the image of the dinosaurs had been transformed by the discovery of much more complete fossil skeletons, especially in North America. It was realized that some dinosaurs had moved around on their large, powerful hind legs, and it was discovered that the dinosaurs could be divided into two main groups: the lizard-hipped saurischians; and the bird-hipped ornithischians. Some of the first giant sauropod skeletons had been found, as well as one of the best known of the giant carnivorous theropods – Allosaurus.

Since then, scientific understanding of the dinosaurs has been revolutionized by new techniques of investigation and new fossil discoveries. From the 1920s, new dinosaur-rich locations have been found in many parts of the world, from Mongolia to Argentina and China. Over the last few decades, Cretaceous localities in China have revealed exceptionally well-preserved and complete skeletons, incredibly some of which even retain indications of the original soft tissues. These finds have caused another revolution in our understanding of dinosaur evolution.