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.
Bones and fossils were discovered prior to that but were mistakenly attributed to living creatures such as elephants. What’s fascinating is that the concept “extinct” didn’t exist until mid 19th century, which is why Darwin’s “Origin of Species” was widely disputed at the time. The idea that species could completely disappear was unfathomable.
Even now we still mistakingly attribute scientific findings to concepts already known to mankind, because it’s simply too “out there” to introduce a completely new theory. It took years and years for the scientific community to accept Lyell’s and Darwin’s theories, but this shows that the scientific peer review system works. If nobody can successfully debunk your theory nor provide a more plausible theory, your theory stands. And that is how we discovered, and accepted, the existence of dinosaurs.
Prior to the present people probably thought they were the bones of mythical beasts. I am not surprised a lot of dinosaur bones look like dragons.
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.
While studying history, we had a commented visit of an archeological museum showing false discoveries. One of them were roman thunderstones.
Roman farmers found stone hatchet blades in their field. Since they did not have the context of where those came from, they thought it was thunder that brought them and they were Jupiter tool to send thunder.
They were conserved as such. Later archeologists identified them as primitive tools used by people living there way before.
[Here](https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Cerauniae-thunderbolts-found-in-Sweden-The-original-image-published-in-Ole-Worms_fig4_26851451) is an article that talks about similar occurences, because that happened a lot.
Short version : people found stuff but did not know what they were.
As a side note, the word “dinosaur” did not exist until until late into the 19th century. Before the word dinosaur, the word “dragon” was used.
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.
Aristotle (4th century BCE) observed fossilized sea shells on hilltops and inferred that this ground must once have been under the sea.
I’ve always thought that myths about dragons have their roots in dinosaur fossils discovered throughout the world.
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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