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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The second half of the 18th century was marked by increased industrialization in the UK. Industry moved from cottages to factories, and these factories were in the big cities like London, and they needed raw materials.
This was long before the railroad, and people were already moving material on England’s vast river system. So what they did is started digging canals.
https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryMagazine/DestinationsUK/The-Canals-of-Britain/
The organized digging through the layers of rock to construct these canals give people interested in geology new insight into how rock layers were laid down and help them first conceptualize that a geological history was written in the rock as it went deeper.
https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/features/WilliamSmith
So people start to understand that these fossils were evidence of creatures that had lived a long time ago.
In addition, there were changes in the religious views of science. The mid-19th century was when ideas about evolution began to emerge in science. Prior to that, everyone thought that the world existed as God created it except for the Great Flood. Fossils were seen as evidence of animals that were killed by the Flood. Remember that Noah took two of each unclean animal and seven of each kosher-for-eating animal onto the ark. So that although lions as a species were saved, there would have been thousands of lions that drowned. And people believed that fossils were evidence of this destruction of most of the animals living on the Earth.
It wasn’t until science began to see life as evolving and changing that they could see fossils of extinct species as distinct from modern animals.
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