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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People did, but had wildly different theories as to what they were.
Something that a lot of people don’t realize is that with dinosaur fossils (any fossils really) you almost never get a complete skeleton, let alone a skeleton with the bones in the correct position. You’ll see lots of people saying that “dinosaur fossils are the basis for dragons”, but there’s zero evidence for this as far as I know and it doesn’t make a lot of sense since, as I said, they weren’t finding complete skeletons of giant reptiles, but more often giant individual bones that they lacked the anatomical knowledge to say what kind of animal they came from. Guesses ranged from Giants (as in giant humans) to elephants to whales that had been left stranded over land from the biblical flood.
There were even weirder theories like spontaneous generation. Aristotle posited that fossils weren’t from living organisms at all. Rather, he said that inorganic matter could become organic matter under the right conditions, and that fossils were from times where this processes had failed partway through. Basically the earth had tried to make an animal, gotten as far as the bones, and then sputtered out.
By the time we reached the 1800s anatomical knowledge and training had advanced to the point where scientists could recognize what kind of animals these fossils were made by.
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