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Dinosaur Discoveries: 1825-1850
By Mace Baker
By and by, more large reptilian fossils were
discovered. In 1833,
Mantell described a third giant reptile, naming it
Hylaeosaurus. Though it
was beginning to be recognized that a new kind of
animal was now being
found in fossilized form, these peculiar animals were
not assigned any
composite name. This was left to Britain’s premier
paleontologist, Richard
Owen. Owen had been regarded, even as a young man, as
a leader in British
science. Many came to him for his opinion on a variety
of questions dealing
with anatomy and paleontology. He soon became a
personal friend of Queen
Victoria. He was often a guest at the palace, where he
gave interesting
lectures on nature to her and her large family.
Among his many achievements is the identification of
the reptilian kind
now known as dinosaurs, as being quite distinct from
the reptiles which we
see today. He had described a number of these
reptiles, and was well aware
of those which had been excavated and described by
others. By 1841, nine
genera of giant reptiles were known to Owen and other
paleontologists. The
ones which Owen studied in particular detail were
Iguanadon, Megalosaurus
and Hylaeosaurus.
Over the years, he had dissected a number of reptiles
which had died at
the Regents Park Zoo in London. Consequently, he began
to realize that the
anatomy of the fossil reptiles could not be placed in
the families or even the
orders under which modern reptiles were classified. He
was convinced that
reptiles such as Iguanadon and Megalosaurus
belonged in a special order of
their own. He conceived of them not merely as giant
reptiles, but as terrible
lizards or “dinosauria”. This name he proposed at the
meeting of the British
Association for the Advancement of Science in 1841. It
was published as
follows in 1842 in the Advancement of Science, “The combination of such characters, some as the sacral bones, altogether peculiar among Reptiles, others borrowed as it were, from groups now distinct from each other, and all manifested by creatures far surpassing in size the largest of existing reptiles, will it is presumed, be deemed sufficient ground for establishing a distinct tribe or suborder of Saurian Reptiles, for which I would propose the name Dinosauria.”
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