Discovering Dinosaurs
Before 1824, dinosaurs were unknown to man. In that year the bones of several kinds of fossilized reptiles were unearthed in England. British paleontologist Richard Owen called these animals Dinosauria, from the two Greek words deinos and sauros, meaning “terrible lizard.” The name remains in common use to this day, although while dinosaurs are reptiles, they are not lizards.
Since 1824, dinosaur fossils have been found on every continent. The fossil record, left in layers of sedimentary, or water-laid, rock, indicates that there was an extraordinary abundance and variety of dinosaur types at a time in earth’s history called the Age of Dinosaurs. Some made their home on land, while others lived in swamps. Some*perhaps even lived in water, much like the*present-day hippopotamus.
Large quantities of dinosaur remains—including such nonskeletal evidence as tracks—have been unearthed in the Great Central Plain of North America. The prairies of central Alberta have yielded many dinosaur remains, including nearly 500 complete skeletons. In the 1920’s, expeditions discovered dinosaur bones in the Gobi Desert of central Asia. In the 1940’s a Soviet expedition in Mongolia discovered a dinosaur skeleton some 40*feet [12 m] in length.
In 1986 Argentine scientists discovered the fossils of a plant-eating dinosaur in Antarctica. Until then, Antarctica had been the only major land area where dinosaur fossils had not been found. Just before that, an American researcher found dinosaur bones on the North Slope of Alaska. Throughout the last hundred years, deposits of dinosaur bones have been uncovered in so many places that it has become apparent that dinosaurs were widespread in the remote past.
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