How were Dinosaur fossils only discovered in the 1800’s? Did no one prior to this time period come across them?
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They were only identified as dinosaurs at that time, prior to that they generally were considered dragon or giant bones (there is a reason those legends are so consistent across human cultures).
So the bones/fossils were found, but not categorized as dinosaur bones.
Dinosaur fossils were first scientifically described as the type of creature we know today in the 1800s. It was in 1841 that the word was first coined. This does not mean that no one had discovered what we today know as dinosaurs before that, they were just identified as something else.
There is documentation from Sichuan China of discoveries of dragon bones in the 3rd and 4th century AD. This is likely dinosaur bones, there is lots of dinosaurs found in that area today. So the reasonable conclusion is that they did find dinosaur bones but identified them as dragons bones. An interesting question is are dinosaur bones the origin of the dragons in the Chinese culture or did they have a belief in a creature and then find bones that might it?
There is documentation of bones found in a limestone quarry in England in 1676 that identified as a femur too large to be from any know species. The condition of today that is was a giant femur that was found. The bone has gone missing but is suspected to be a Megalosaurus femur.
It is likely that humans have discovered dinosaur bones for millennia. It is not unreasonable to think that some finds like that are the origin of some mythological creatures.
If you found dinosaur bones and had no idea what a dinosaur was and had no way to determine the age of it and you had no idea of how old earth is or that bones can fossilize. It is not unreasonable to think it was some large creature that recently was alive. You need lots of data to come to the conclusion is was a large creature that lived between 240 and 66 million years ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinosaur#History_of_study
So dinosaur bones have likely been found for thousands of years and identified as something else. It was first in the 19th century it was identified as what we know dinosaurs it today-
Early Greek people found bones of prehistoric ancestors of elephants and created the idea of the cyclops to account for the skulls.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/news-deinotherium-fossils-crete-mythology-paleontology
They found dinosaur bones and believed them to be the remains of giants.
https://www.scienceworld.ca/stories/what-did-people-think-when-first-dinosaur-fossils-were-discovered/
Plenty of people found dinosaur fossils before the 1800s, but it wasn’t until the 1800s that people started to realize they represented the skeletons of extinct reptiles and not biblical giants, Roman war elephants, or “Scrotum humanum”. Another thing to remember is that most fossils are underground so the expansion of mining for coal, metals, and minerals associated with the Industrial revolution led to an increase in the discovery of fossils, giving scientists more opportunities to study them.
Most skeletons were dis-articulated, and it was common for a given dinosaur skeleton in the early museums to be made up from several partial skeletons found in different locations.
Before the 1800’s biologists knew of whales and elephants, so finding a large bone didn’t necessarily paint them a clear picture….
Believe it it not.. this is a belief in South India (Tamil nadu) in olden days there exists a animal ( similar to description of what we call as dinosaur today) that is capable of eating an elephant. It is represented in lots of stone sculpture and lots of them still exist today in various temple. The animal is called “yazhi” in Tamil. So yes lots of ancient people were aware of dinosaur.
On the top of the mountain that flanks the east side of my town there are seashell fossils 10,000+ feet above sea level.
Some people told me when I was young and impressionable that this was evidence of the biblical flood, how else were sea creatures that high up. The actual answer is that 100 million years ago it was below sea level and the mountain rose after.
It’s not accurate to say that dinosaurs were only discovered in the 1800s.
Robert Plot, in 1677, is credited with discovering the first dinosaur fossil, but he only speculated that it was the remains of a giant human. There was no such word as ‘dinosaur’ yet.
William Buckland, an Oxford professor of geology, attributed the bones to a larger reptilian creature in 1824, after discovering more bones of what would turn out to be the same creature Plot had discovered — he called it ‘Megalosaurus’, but the word ‘dinosaur’ itself still hadn’t been created.
That would come in 1842 courtesy of Sir Richard Owen, who sorted the bones into the fossil family ‘dinosauria’, and would later found London’s Natural History Museum in 1881.
[https://www.discovery.com/science/First-Dinosaur-Fossil-Name](https://www.discovery.com/science/First-Dinosaur-Fossil-Name)
They just didn’t understand they were dinosaurs! George Washington didn’t know what the hell a brontosaurus was, but he believed giants were a thing. Go look up what the skull of a pachycephalosaurus looks like and tell me that’s not a dragon. The cyclops Polyphemus was a mammoth.
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