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| Discovering Dinosaurs |
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| By: Jeffrey |
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| Eleven-year-old Mary Anning and her brother, Joseph, were collecting seashells for their widowed mother to sell in her shop in Lyme Regis, England. While digging in the sand, they found a seventeen foot skull. The year was 1811. Little did Mary and Joseph know that their discovery was to change the knowledge of the history of the world and the mystery of life for all time. Their discovery was later identified as Ichthyosaurs. The dinosaur hunt had begun! |
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| For 65 million years the clues to the history of life were hidden in stone, rock, and sand. Now it was up to scientists to uncover the mysteries of life in the world with their picks, shovels, and hammers. |
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| In the Middle Ages as well as in Roman times people collected fish bones and sea shells, but there has been no record any dinosaur bone`s found. In the fifteen and sixteen hundreds, people did not think that the world was any older than four thousand years old. People also thought that there were no extinct animals or plants. In 1677, Robert Plot had a book that consisted of a description and a picture of the end of a thigh bone of a dinosaur, later named Megalosaurus. Plot thought it was the bone from a giant man. This was the first description and drawing of a dinosaur. |
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| By the 1820`s, people`s ideas of the age of the earth, and of what we can learn from fossils, changed. In 1818, William Buckland, a professor of geology at Oxford University, found some bones in a quarry in Stones Field, England. In 1824 he published a description of the bones. There were knife-like teeth, a jawbone, limb bones, and vertebrae. He named these bones Megalosaurus (giant reptile.) This was the first dinosaur to be published. |
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| In 1818, Mary Montell found a large fossil tooth by the side of the road, in some rubble. She took it home to her husband, Dr. Gideon Montell, in Sussex, England. He studied it, and at first he thought it came from a large fish or a rhinoceros. Dr. Montell found more bones and named the animal Iguanodon, because the teeth were an exact replica of an iguana, only bigger. In 1833, Dr. Montell found another dinosaur and named it Hylaeosaurus. |
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| Sir Richard Owen studied the findings of Buckland and Montell. He concluded that they were not giant lizards, but belonged to a completely extinct group. In 1841, he invented the name dinosaur, which means terrible lizard. |
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| In 1858, Edward Hitchcock wrote a book about three- toed footprints in New England. . He thought they belonged to giant birds. We now know that Ammosaurus, Anchisaurus, and Megalosaurus made them. |
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| In 1858 an almost full skeleton and a number of fossils were found in New Jersey. Joseph Leidy studied the skeleton. He put the skeleton together as best he could. From his studying and building, he realized that the back limbs were longer than the front limbs. He said that not all dinosaurs were four-legged walkers. |
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| In the last decades of the nineteenth century, Edward Dinker Cope and Othaniel Marsh, two great rivals, sent out paid "bone collectors" in Montana, Wyoming, and Colorado. They did this to see who could collect the most bones. This was named "Bone Wars". They found Allosaurus, Apatosaurus, Camorasaurus, Camposaurus, Coilophysis, Diplodocus, Stegosaurus, and Triceratops. |
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| In 1878, in a Belgium coal mine, at least thirty- nine skeletons were found. The skeletons were later identified as Iguanadons. |
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| In 1909, the Berlin Museum went on an expedition led by Werner Janensch, in a remote part of Tanzania, Africa. Janensch and his crew found some complete skeletons of Brachiosaurus, Dicraeosaurus, Elaphrosaurus, and Kentrosaurus. |
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| In 1922, an American crew led by Roy Chapman Andrews, found the remains of a Protoreraterps in its nest. This was the first discovery of dinosaur eggs. Andrews, the man who became the real life model for Indiana Jones, also found remains of Overaptor, Saurornithoides, and a Velociraptor. |
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| Charles Sternberg, who had previously worked for Edward Dinker Cope, collected quite a few specimens such as Albertosaurus, Anatosaurus, Ceratosaurus, Corythosaurus, Daspletosaurus, Edmontosaurus, Monoclonius, Parasaurolophus, Styracosaurus, and Triceratops. |
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| In 1983, William Walker found several bones in a pit in Surrey, England. A team from the British Museum studied the bones and put together an entire skeleton of a new carnivorous dinosaur! The dinosaur was named Baryonyx. |
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| Digging For Dinosaurs |
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| Have you ever wondered how scientists get those big bones out of the ground? Well, this is how it`s done. First, the scientists work to clear the site. Next, they use jackhammers and picks to uncover parts of the bones. When the scientists are six to eight inches from a bone, they use an air scribe to remove the rocks without damaging the bone. An air scribe is a special tool that works like a miniature jackhammer to remove small pieces of rock from the fossil. Next, scientists place plaster on the bone to shield it and keep it safe on the ride home. While the bones are being dug from the ground, other scientists work to map out where each bone was found. |
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| While dinosaurs no longer roam freely on the earth, interest in them will never be extinct. The hunt continues... |
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