Uncovering dinosaurs – our past, present, and future - Vol 4 Sneak Peek
Our knowledge on dinosaurs has expanded in recent years, but how exactly do we know so much about these incredible animals?
Article by: Rosie Brown
Artwork by: Amy McPherson
If you were asked now to picture a dinosaur, what would you envision?
No doubt you’d imagine a Tyrannosaur, or maybe a Triceratops or Diplodocus. All giant, unusual animals that once roamed the Earth for 165 million years – however, as we know this all came to an end 66 million years ago. An asteroid, six miles in diameter, collided with Earth and wiped out 75% of all life, including all non-avian dinosaurs.
How do we know then that such animals existed? The answers can be found within rocks.
To begin, let’s look at when dinosaurs were first discovered. In 1824, William Buckland acquired the remains of the first discovered dinosaur and wrote of the Megalosaurus in an article - “Notice on the Megalosaurus or great Fossil Lizard of Stonesfield.”
Yet it was not until 1842 that the term Dinosauria was coined by Richard Owen in a piece describing not just Megalosaurus, but also the recently discovered Iguanodon and Hylaeosaurus. Upon discovering similarities between the three, he placed them in a new group known as, you guessed it, dinosaurs.
Naturally, questions began to be asked – what did these giant creatures look like, how did they behave, and where did they go?
The majority of Victorian scientists illustrated dinosaurs with anatomy similar to that of modern day lizards, with their legs splayed out from the side of their bodies. However, Owen imagined these animals as having the legs directly below the body due to their large size, depicting them similar in size and shape to modern mammals.
Working alongside Owen, natural history artist Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins created the world’s first dinosaur sculptures. They were unveiled in 1852 at Crystal Palace and can still be seen to this day.
These first dinosaur reconstructions are a far-cry from what we now know as dinosaurs, but they are significant. Research based on Owen’s early idea on dinosaurs having an upright stance is a key feature when differentiating dinosaurs from non-dinosaurian reptiles, such as Dimetrodon.
As more dinosaur remains were unearthed, our understanding of these animals grew. Yet, lacking the knowledge we now have today, early depictions of dinosaurs which now seem bizarre were at the time treated as an authentic representation of the animal.
One famous illustration by Heinrich Harder from 1916 depicted a Diplodocus with its belly dragging along the floor, legs sprawled – similar to a crocodile. At the time, it was believed Diplodocus was amphibious and semi-aquatic, and its anatomy and posture were hotly debated upon its discovery. For some time, Diplodocus was considered to move by dragging itself through trenches it would dig! This was quickly disproven.
Another common depiction showed dinosaurs dragging their tails along the ground, famous artist Neave Parker illustrated as such in the 1961, basing his work off the findings of palaeontologist William Elgin Swinton. It was not until the 1970s that this theory was disproved – dinosaur anatomy would not have allowed for this posture, and there was a lack of tail traces found in fossilised footprints.
Our understanding of dinosaurs has come a long way since these depictions, and further still from Hawkin’s reconstructions in 1852.
In the last 20 years alone there has been an abundance of new discoveries – modern technology has enabled palaeontologists to further develop their understanding and paint a vivid picture of prehistoric Earth.
Perhaps the most notable of these discoveries is what dinosaurs may have looked like.
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