The first dinosaur fossil was found in 1822.
1822, the mantels came to the countryside of Sussex. Among the local stones used for road construction, Mrs Mantel found a tooth fossil. Of course, a tooth doesn't mean anything, but Mantel, who likes to get to the bottom of it, won't stop because he can't see who the owner of the tooth is. So he went to the quarry many times, hoping to find more things. Messy and Mantel found a few more.
With deep doubts, Mantell found Mr. Ye Wei, a French naturalist with the reputation of "the father of paleontology", and asked him to look at these unusual fossils. The identification result of ju is the maxillary incisors of rhinoceros. Then, William Baekeland, a professor of geology at Oxford University in England, came to the same conclusion. Mantel found that there were no mammalian fossils in the strata around the quarry after consulting the data. He doubted the arguments of these authorities.
Of course, because of Mantel's limited knowledge of paleontology, he could not get a satisfactory research result. Finally, with these fossils, Mantel came to the Hantrian Museum. Unfortunately, there is no similar fossil specimen in the museum for reference. At this time, a young scholar who studied iguanas appeared. Because he has a considerable number of iguanas, young scholars and Mantel hold unknown teeth.
The cheerful Mantel decided that the unknown tooth fossils belonged to the giant iguanas that once appeared. So he combined the Latin word for toothless iguana and gave this animal a scientific name, which we now know as Iguanodon. Therefore, it is called "dinosaur" in English, which means "terrible lizard".
1677, an Englishman named prout wrote a natural history book about Oxfordshire. In this book, prout describes the giant femur fossil found in a quarry in the parish of Karovilla. Prout drew a good illustration of this fossil and pointed out that this thigh bone belongs to a giant bigger than them.
Although Prut didn't realize that this fossil belonged to dinosaurs, and even didn't associate it with reptiles, the specimen he described with words and illustrations has been identified by later paleontologists as the thigh bone of a dinosaur called Megalodon, and this fossil was discovered 1.45 years before the Iguanodon was discovered in Mantels. Therefore, Husted thinks that Prut should be the first discoverer and recorder of dinosaur fossils.
Although ancient people in China discovered dinosaurs as early as the Jin Dynasty, they thought it was a legendary dragon's bone. Although Mr. Prut discovered and described Megalodon as early as 1677, he mistakenly thought that they were the remains of giants. Although Iguanodon fossils were discovered in Mantels in 1822, they were not published until 1825.
At the same time that Iguanodon was identified, buckland, a British geologist, took the lead in publishing the world's first scientific report on dinosaurs in 1824, reporting the dinosaur mandible fossils collected in a quarry-Ban Long buckland thought it was a new reptile, and Ban Long's Latin name was "the big lizard in the quarry".