Long before the word “dinosaur” was ever coined, people occasionally stumbled upon gigantic fossilized bones without knowing what creatures they came from. One of the first such cases occurred in the late 17th century when an enormous fossil discovered in England was believed to be the fossil of a giant elephant.The discovery happened in 1676 in a limestone quarry at Cornwell near Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire. There, workers found a large portion of a leg bone that attracted the attention of the English scholar and naturalist Robert Plot. He described it in his book, The Natural History of Oxford-shire published in 1677.
Discovery of dinosaurs
Robert Plot understood that the fossil belonged to an enormous creature but was unaware of the existence of dinosaurs. It should be noted that at that time the idea of extinction had not emerged and all animals created by God were supposed to exist somewhere in the world.Since the bone was unusually large in size, he rejected the idea of any horse, cattle, or other similar common animal and postulated that this bone could belong to a giant human referred to in Bible stories or even a giant elephant that might have got into Britain at the time of Roman Empire. His theory regarding the origin of this bone seemed quite reasonable since there were records of existence of elephants but no records of presence of giant reptiles on Earth.However, unfortunately, the original fossil is lost now and Plot’s detailed sketch and description is all we have about this discovery. But many years later, when knowledge of fossils had become well-established among scientists, they studied this sketch and came to the conclusion that this fossil bone was not of any elephant but of a giant meat-eating dinosaur.It was 1824 when Buckland, who is a geologist and a fossil hunter, scientifically described the animal based on fossils collected in Oxfordshire. This dinosaur was given the name Megalosaurus, which means “great lizard,” becoming the very first dinosaur that was given a proper scientific name almost 200 years since Robert Plot analyzed its bone.The term “dinosaur” came only in 1842 when the anatomist Richard Owen created the name “Dinosauria” to classify some giant reptile animals in prehistory.Robert Plot’s fossil is now known by many scientists as one of the first dinosaur fossils to be recorded in history. Of course, the identification of the fossil may be inaccurate, but it represents the level of knowledge that existed during his time. The lack of ideas about dinosaurs, geological time, and extinction made it difficult to understand fossils.This is an example of the way in which science advances through the ages. What was originally thought to be the skeleton of a giant elephant ultimately became part of the proof which uncovered an entire world which had been forgotten – the world of the dinosaurs.
