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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Dinosaur _fossils_ have been discovered for ages, but there’s a big difference between digging up a fossil and understanding what it is.
Prior to the 1800’s, when people dug up fossils (and more frequently, subfossil bones from ice age animals, which are more common and easier to find) they tended to interpret them in light of their existing myths and legends. So, for example, when a wooly rhino skull was dug up near Klagenfurt, it was thought to be the skull of a dragon.
Because fossils are almost always found as a jumble of bones rather than a neat skeleton and because they are incomplete, and because reconstructing an animals from a jumble of bones is a difficult process that requires a good understanding of comparative anatomy, nobody looked at dinosaur skeletons and realized what the animals that made them actually looked like. For example, the town of Klagenfurt commissioned a statue of their dragon which looks absolutely nothing like a wooly rhino but a lot like a traditional dragon. Cyclops of myth look nothing like the elephants whose skulls may have inspired them.
It was only after the scientific revolution that people started to do the sort of rigorous scientific study into the bones and anatomy of a wide range of _modern_ animals that they were able to start to identify dinosaurs as the unique creatures they were, and even then it took a while for them to get the details right. Dinosaurs were so named because scientists realized their bones were similar in some ways to lizard bones, but much larger. Iguanodon got its name because Gideon Mantell recognized a similarity between its teeth and the teeth of an iguana.
So that was the sticking point, not so much the finding of bones but the figuring out what they meant.
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