On February 20th, 2024, I was driving home from the grocery store listening to NPR when a news segment came on describing that it was the 200th anniversary of the first scientific dinosaur name pronunciation. The story described that back in 1824 a man named William Buckland, looking at bones and fossils found outside of Oxford, England, noticed that they had a lizard-esque appearance and as such he named the creature to which the assemblage belonged to Megalosaurus, Latin for “great” (mega) “lizard” (saurus). The radio story, however, did not describe how he came to realize that the bones and fossils were reptilian and not, as previously thought, dragons, monsters, or giant humanoids. With my son wearing his dinosaur onesie on this particular day, it seemed that fate paved the road for the following article:
The lack of understanding about extinction and the origin of fossils led to many debates and differing interpretations in the early days of fossil discovery. Robert Plot, who discovered the first dinosaur bone in England in 1677, is a prime example. During the 17th century, the idea of extinction was not as common or known as it is today — too known today with up to 1%, or about 10,000, of the world’s species going extinct annually. As such, when Plot came across an exceptionally large femur bone, he could only imagine animals that existed in 1677. As such, he proposed this femur bone could have been from an elephant brought to England during the Roman invasions or, as he later and finally proposed, a giant human. Indeed, Professor Paul Barrett of London’s Natural History Museum describes, “[It was thought that] if it was a giant man, it was a… very well-endowed giant man… so eventually [the bone fragment they initially found] became named Scrotum humanum.” (It turned out that this bone was actually a piece of the Megalosaurus thigh bone over a century later.)
Furthermore, Plot published a piece titled “Natural History of Oxfordshire” in 1677, where he argued that fossils were formed from mineral salt crystallization rather than being the remains of living organisms. Even though fossils have a sticking similarity to organic matter, Plot instead hypothesized that they had inorganic origin because “Salts are the principal Ingredients of the Stones”. In particular, he even proposed that some fossils were created from the animal’s urine that crystalized around them after they died. We know now that fossils form, typically, by sediment quickly covering animal or plant matter so that they don’t erode or decay, then, after more layers of sediment build on top to create a lot of pressure, water-carrying minerals seep into the cavities to create the fossil.
Over a century later, William Buckland found his own set of bones and fossils in 1815 — the bones of an animal that would turn out to be the very same one discovered by Robert Plot. In 1824, Buckland concluded that these bones belonged to an extinct, carnivorous lizard and named it “Megalosaurus.” This marked the first recognition of a dinosaur, even though Buckland didn’t realize his specimen was a dinosaur at the time. Buckland deduced the reptilian connection — the “saurus”, or lizard suffix in the creature’s name — through mere observation, noting that “the vertebral column and extremities much resemble those of quadrupeds, the teeth show the creature to have been oviparous, and to have belonged to the order of Saurinans or Lizards.” Very large lizards indeed that had “a length exceeding 40 feet and a bulk equal to that of an elephant”.
The second ‘dinosaur’ was identified by Mary Ann and Gideon Mantell. As the story goes, while accompanying her husband in Sussex, Mary Ann found the fossils on the side of the road. Gideon brought the teeth fossils to Georges Culver, a famous naturalist and zoologist of the time, who initially dismissed them as rhinoceros teeth. Like many women during the 1800s, she was an assistant to her husband, dictating and illustrating much of his — their — work on fossil records. Mary Ann’s 364 lithographs that accompanied her husband’s publication, The Fossils of the South Downs published in 1822, included what they called an “Iguanadon,” a reptilian-like creature resembling an iguana.
Just a few years later, the collection of fossils at both Oxford and the British Museum for Richard Owens to start putting the bigger pieces together. Examining three specimens the Megalosaurus, Iguanodon and Hylaeosaurus, Owens noted that each of them had a fused vertebrae at the base of the spine, a feature unknown in other reptiles. This unique relationship prompted him to name the clade “Dinosauria” in his Report on British Fossil Records from the Greek “deinos,” “terrible/powerful/wonderous” and the Latin “saurus,” again meaning lizard or reptile.
The rigorous and modern biochemist in me was kind of disappointed with Buckland’s methodology in naming the first dinosaur: “it looks kinda like a lizard so it’s probably a lizard” and “there aren’t any animals that look like this now, so this species must be extinct.” While both valid statements and cogent arguments, I wished that there had been more ~ science ~ around it rather than logic. But in these times, as I mentioned above about hypotheses about fossil origins, there wasn’t the technology or techniques in the creation of phylogenetic trees to have the certainty afforded to DNA sequencing. The early controversies around the origin of fossils and the existence of creatures that no longer walked the earth represent the chaos around the emerging field of paleontology. It also underscores how this field has evolved over time as our understanding of the natural world improved.
We now know that the clade of Dinosauria all share a common evolutionary history based on a set of shared characteristics that includes a wide range of creatures from stegosaurus to hummingbirds which was likely un-thinkable back in the mid-1800s. Evolution itself was highly contested and very provocative during the naming of dinosaurs, Darwin’s On the Origin of Species published in 1859. Indeed, Richard Owen himself was an outspoken critic of Darwin.
All of this brief deep dive makes me miss being in the depths of scientific discovery and research. The drama of new findings shifting paradigms was always thrilling to me at conferences big and small while I was in graduate school. It goes to show that “time will tell” what hypotheses and paradigms are backed by data rather than just being cogent narratives. Between feathered dinosaurs and Neptune no longer being blue, science is constantly being updated with the acquisition of new information and shifts in culture. It makes me wonder which scientific stories we tell ourselves now that would be akin to “fossils are crystallized urine.”