In 1842 a young English scientist named Richard Owen created the word Dinosauria to describe a newly discovered group of ancient animals. A word created from Greek roots meaning “terrible lizards” the name caught on. Although Owen created the name “Dinosaur” and took much of the credit for earlier paleontological study, he did not actually discover the fossils himself.
Owens based his theory of dinosaurs on the first three published dinosaur discoveries. The first dinosaur fossil described was the Megalosaurus, discovered and described by Rev. William Buckland in 1824. Next was the Iguanodon, presented to the Royal Geological Society in 1825 by Gideon Mantell, an English obstetrician and amateur fossil hunter. The third was the Hylaeosaurus, also discovered by Mantell and presented in 1832.
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The first evidence he found of the dinosaur was its teeth, which he showed to various scholars. He believed that they were similar to the modern iguana, but twenty times larger, and proposed that they were from a rather large, ancient reptile. When shown to Buckland, he initially insisted that the Iguanodon teeth belonged to a fish rather than reptile. Then when Mantell presented the teeth to a renowned paleontologist in Paris, he was rather embarrassingly informed that they belonged not to a 60 foot Mesozoic reptile, but a rhinoceros. Although the paleontologist changed his mind the next morning and agreed that they did, in fact, belong to something entirely new, Mantell’s reputation never recovered in