Name: An Illustrated History of Dinosaurs
Uploaded: 2021-05-03T00:02:41.000Z
Duration: 12 min 20 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

No other animals from the deep past capture our imaginations like dinosaurs.

Any kid old enough to hold a crayon can probably draw one.

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And we older kids have our own images that come to mind when we think of the terrible

But the reason that we have to imagine the non-avian dinosaurs, of course, is that they're

Thankfully, a ton of science has gone into our understanding of how dinosaurs looked,

But the truth is, we've only had a few hundred years to bring that picture into focus.

So if you page through a book about natural history, or stroll through a museum hall,

you'll get some idea of what paleontologists think dinosaurs looked like.

But even the most up-to-date restorations of our prehistoric favorites are only part

Because our image of dinosaurs has been constantly changing -- evolving, you might say -- ever

since naturalists started studying them about 350 years ago.

And this evolution is reflected in hundreds of years' worth of drawings, paintings,

and models of dinosaurs, each made in an attempt to get us a little closer to visualizing animals

Taken together, these pictures can tell us a whole lot about just how much we've learned

in just a short three and a half centuries.

So today, we're going to explore the history of dinosaur science, as seen through the history

When naturalists first started to find dinosaur bones, they didn't quite know what to make

of them … as you can tell from the very first illustration of a dino fossil ever published.

Back in 1677 -- more than 160 years before the word “dinosaur” was even coined -- an

English chemist named Robert Plot published his Natural History of Oxfordshire, a catalog

of rocks, minerals and fossils from his home county.

And it included a drawing of a strange bone that had been found in a limestone quarry.

Plot could tell that it was the end of a femur, or a thigh bone.

But it was clearly from an animal far larger than any living in England at that time.

He suggested that the thigh fragment might have belonged to a Roman war elephant, or

But it turned out that, in his book, Plot had given the world the very first scientific

In 1763, English naturalist Richard Brookes re-printed Plot's illustration, in a six-volume

set he called A System of Natural History.

And Brookes bestowed a name on the fossil.

In a caption of Plot's picture, he called the specimen Scrotum humanum.

Because although he knew it was a piece of a femur, he thought it looked like … a pair

Paleontologists now know that bone belonged to Megalosaurus, a dinosaur named by WIlliam

Working from some more and better material -- including a lower jaw and teeth -- Buckland

was able to tell that this animal was a previously-unknown kind of carnivorous reptile.

To Buckland's mind, the creature looked not like a giant, or an even elephant, but like

a crocodile -- although, one about the size of a bus.

And from this time we still have a lithograph of the crucial fossil -- the one that established

Megalosaurus as a new, fierce form of ancient life.

From these rather inauspicious beginnings -- cases of mistaken identity involving war

elephants and human genitals -- the idea started to sink in that dinosaurs were something truly

special -- specifically, a kind of reptile that used to exist, but didn't any more.

But, in the early 1800s, scientists still pictured dinosaurs as being much like the

The English physician Gideon Mantell, for example, figured that if dinosaurs were reptiles,

then they must've basically been just giant lizards.

Based on some fossil teeth that he found in Sussex, Mantell was convinced that he had

found the prehistoric equivalent of an iguana -- albeit one about 30 meters long.

He made a sketch of the creature's skeleton in his personal notes, following the same

And in 1825 he officially gave the animal the name Iguanodon, or “iguana tooth.”

A few years later, Mantell was visited by artist John Martin.

Martin was famous for his paintings of dramatic, apocalyptic scenes, like his 1822 painting,

And after meeting Mantell, Martin used his vision of the Iguanodon to create the first

-- and maybe the most over-the-top -- scene of dinosaur combat ever committed to canvas.

This painting, The Country of the Iguanodon is all coils and teeth and claws.

And at the time, it summed up what experts thought ancient reptiles were like: Giant,

vicious lizards who hissed and snapped at each other.

British anatomist Richard Owen proposed that Megalosaurus, Iguanodon, and another newly

discovered animal, called Hylaeosaurus, all shared special physical traits -- found in

their hips and other bones -- that made them different from all other reptiles.

And in 1842, he came up with a new name for this form of extinct life: “dinosaur,”

from the Greek for “terrible lizard.”

Dinosaurs weren't just supersized lizards, he said.

In many ways, they resembled mammals in their structure and their stance.

And Owen portrayed his vision of dinosaurs not on paper, or canvas, but in three

For England's Great Exhibition of 1854, Owen worked with artist Benjamin Waterhouse

Hawkins to create life-sized versions of dinosaurs and other ancient creatures, as he pictured

The models were so immense that Hawkins even famously held a New Years' banquet inside

And when the models were unveiled to the public, they became the new image of what we thought

These animals were built more like rhinos, carrying their legs under their bodies, but

with scaly skin and tails that dragged on the ground behind them.

And it was other new insights into dinosaurs' legs that led to the next big shift in how

Most of the earliest dinosaur fossils were found in Europe and were extremely fragmented.

Sometimes it was hard to tell which parts went with which.

But when naturalists started looking in North America, they found more complete skeletons

that made paleontologists completely re-think dinosaurs.

A pair of critical finds were made in New Jersey.

In 1858, a farmer found the bones of an animal we now call Hadrosaurus.

The skeleton wasn't complete, but there were enough parts of the arms, legs, and tail

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An Illustrated History of Dinosaurs

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