Question: who discovered the first dinosuars

Andrew Scott answered on 24 Jun 2015:

Hi Leprachuan2001,

I’m not an expert on dinosaurs, but I’ve done a quick bit of research and the first dinosaur bone was probably found in 1676 by Robert Plot. People didn’t realise that it was part of an ancient giant lizard like creature until much later in the 1800s, when people started to find more bones and whole dinosaurs. The first description of a dinosaur, Megalosaurus, was by William Buckland in 1824. He was a bit ‘eccentric’. He was said to have had a pet bear who went riding with him and attempted to try eating every animal in the world, including moles, bluebottle flies and maybe even the heart of a French king kept in a monastery.

However, the various bones and skeletons were linked together in 1842 as dinosaurs by Sir Richard Owen, who named them dinosauria. He was also responsible for the huge dinosaur models produced for the Great Exhibition of 1851. You can now see them in Crystal Palace Park, I take my children quite a lot. They don’t look like our modern interpretation of a dinosaur, he probably got quite a lot of things wrong!