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 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-
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