Imagine entering a dusty storage room at the University of Oxford in the 17th century and coming across massive fossilized bones. For decades, these remains sat in storage without anyone truly understanding their origin. Did they belong to giants from ancient legends? Were they the remains of mythological creatures?
It was not until the 19th century that a group of British scientists began to unravel the mystery.
But have you ever wondered when dinosaurs were actually discovered? How have we come to know them so well when all we’ve ever recovered are scattered bones and almost no complete skeletons?
An Uncertain Origin, but Older Than It Seems
First, we need to put the era when dinosaurs dominated our planet into context. We are talking about the Mesozoic — a period that, according to current estimates, began about 255 million years ago and ended about 65 million years ago.
Indeed, the Mesozoic came to an end with the Cretaceous-Paleogene mass extinction, which occurred approximately 66 million years ago. Although multiple hypotheses were debated for decades, the current scientific consensus supports the theory of an asteroid impact — roughly 6 miles in diameter — on Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula, which formed the Chicxulub crater.
However, paleontologists believe this catastrophic event did not act in isolation: Geological evidence suggests that massive volcanic eruptions, changes in sea level, and earlier climate shifts had already weakened ecosystems.
The extinction was, therefore, the result of a combination of factors, with the asteroid impact serving as the final trigger, setting off sudden and dramatic climate shifts, including an “impact winter” caused by dust and aerosols that blocked sunlight for years.
Of course, dinosaur bones have been buried for millions of years — but it’s almost certain that ever since humans first walked the earth, they have stumbled across them, and even put them to use.
Understanding what those gigantic bones were is another matter entirely. It’s worth remembering that, despite the image we all have in our heads, dinosaurs came in many sizes — not all of them were giants.
Fittingly, that sense of imposing scale gave the first formally described dinosaur its name. It was the Megalosaurus bucklandii, named by Gideon Mantell, a professor at Oxford, in honor of its “discoverer,” Professor William Buckland.
Oxford had reportedly kept dinosaur bones in storage since the 17th century, without ever recognizing them for what they were. That fossilized femur of a large carnivore was the discovery that set the stage for all that came after.
Later came the Iguanodon anglicus and the Hylaeosaurus armatus, both also discovered and named by Mantell.
It was 1832, and those three extinct reptiles sat at Oxford without attracting much attention. Until Sir Richard Owen came along.
Dinosaurs: A Catch-All Category Still Present Today
A decade later, while those fossils were still gathering dust — ironically — in an Oxford University storage room, British paleontologist Sir Richard Owen decided to take a closer look.
In an article published in 1842, Owen proposed the creation of a new suborder within the reptile group. For this new grouping, he coined the now-famous term: “dinosaur” — simply a combination of two Greek words meaning “terrible” and “lizard.”
In Owen’s view, the three fossils shared enough key characteristics to warrant a classification of their own. They were reptiles, and far larger than any other saurians known at the time.
The term quickly caught on in the scientific community, giving rise to a new category that would eventually encompass hundreds of species — some of which weren’t even particularly large. That is why today we consider both the Tyrannosaurus Rex and the Pterodactyl to be dinosaurs, even though pterosaurs were not technically dinosaurs, but a distinct group of flying reptiles.
Richard Owen had not discovered dinosaurs, but he had classified them and given them a colossal name. His work caught the attention of the British Royal Family, who backed his efforts to found a museum in London dedicated to displaying these bones, which at the time were scattered across various universities.
Still, many mysteries remained to be uncovered. A decade later, William Parker Foulke found a nearly complete skeleton of a hadrosaur in New Jersey.
It was a significant step forward: this was no longer a handful of scattered fragments, but a nearly complete skeleton.
Bringing Dinosaurs to Life
Naturally, a great dinosaur fever took hold, as countries and universities raced to find and preserve the finest specimens they could.
Drawing on new skeletal discoveries, biologists and paleontologists identified additional characteristics of these creatures. Some were bipedal, while others — typically herbivores — tended to be quadrupedal.
Throughout the 19th century, the public image of dinosaurs continued to evolve — remarkable, given that the animals themselves had been extinct for millions of years.
Authors such as Jules Verne and Arthur Conan Doyle incorporated them into their work, helping to launch a tradition of stories that blended science fiction and adventure.
Dinosaurs would also appear in films during the first half of the 20th century, but the moment they truly captured the public imagination came in 1993.
“Jurassic Park” brought them back to life — almost literally — with a screenplay based on Michael Crichton’s novel and direction by Steven Spielberg. The film combined animatronics with groundbreaking computer-generated effects — a technology still in its infancy at the time.
The success of “Jurassic Park” was immediate, making it the highest-grossing film in history until “Titanic” claimed that title four years later.
Its cultural influence reached far beyond the film itself, turning dinosaurs into a phenomenon and spawning a franchise that continues to this day.
