DINOSAURS!: From Cultural to Pop Culture - 1841: Dinosauria

DINOSAURS! From Cultural to Pop Culture

Modern Times

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1841: Dinosauria

Before we had the countless species of dinosaurs that most nine year olds could easily school me on, we had a time before dinosaurs were called such. However, scientists started putting together the puzzles that the bones left behind and realized that the bones reconstructed animals that don't resemble anything currently alive.

These discoveries prompted Sir Richard Owen to evaluate what we knew about these fossils. Based on the discovery of animals like Megalosaurus, Iguanodon, and Hylaeosaurus, he noticed that these animals all shared a couple of interesting features.

1. They had columnar legs, instead of sprawling legs, like how modern crocodilians have. This marked them as distinctly different from modern day reptiles.
2. Their vertebrae were fused to the pelvic girdle.

It was because of this, that Owen gave a talk entitled Report on British Fossil Reptiles. Part II  to the 11th meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science held at Plymouth in July of 1841. This report was then published within the Report of the Eleventh Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (1841), (p. 60-204). Within the publication, Owen stated:

"The combination of such characters, some as the sacral ones, altogether peculiar among reptiles, others borrowed, as it were, from groups now distinct from each other, and all manifested by creatures far surpassing in size the largest of existing reptiles, will, it is presumed, be deemed sufficient ground for establishing a distinct tribe or suborder of Saurian Reptiles, for which I would propose the name of Dinosauria."

From this moment on, we had DINOSAURS!

References
Owen, R., 1841, Report of British fossil reptiles. Part II: Reports of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, v. 11, p. 60-204.