Jasmine: Hi, I’m Jasmine.
Chrissy: …and I’m Chrissy.
Jasmine: We’re from NIU STEAM and…
Chrissy: You’re listening to The Sound of Science on WNIJ.
Renty: Hi, my name is Renty and I’ve always wondered how did they find the fossils of the dinosaurs?
Jasmine: Another excellent question from a guest who visited us at STEMFest a few weeks ago! It is newsworthy when archeologists and paleontologists find a new location that contains fossils, but what about the first fossil discovery?
Chrissy: The earliest recorded discovery of a remnant of dinosaur history was in 1676 when Robert Plot found a huge thigh bone in England. Back in the early 17th century, dinosaurs weren’t something that were part of public common knowledge, so these finds were either thought to belong to huge humans or mythical creatures.
Jasmine: It wasn’t until the early 1800’s that it was suspected that giant animals once roamed the earth and not giant humans. Gideon Mantell found a gigantic fossil while digging in the Sussex quarry which turned out to be one of the first known lguanodon teeth to ever be found. This was a key turning point in how scientists dug for and classified fossils.
Chrissy: A quest for paleontology supremacy brought forth the discovery of many new dinosaur genre during the American Gilded Age of the 19th Century. “The Bone Wars”, a fierce and underhanded competition between Othniel Charles Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope, saw the use of bribery, theft, destruction of bones, funding tampering, and public attacks in scientific publications that went on to publicly ruin both men financially and in reputation. Their losses brought forth gains for the Stegosaurus, Allosaurus, and Triceratops.
Jasmine: In the mid 1800’s the word “dinosaur” was first coined by Sir Richard Owen, an English biologist and paleontologist. He recognized these giant ancient animals as the order of Dinosauria and began the modern era of dinosaur research and classification.
Chrissy: You’ve been listening to The Sound of Science on WNIJ, where you learn something new every day.
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