Dinosaur Bones

Dinosaur Bones

The first dinosaur I ever saw was in a book. There were pictures of all different kinds. The book said what dinosaurs ate and where they lived. It said they all died out 65 million years ago.

Then I went to the museum and saw dinosaur bones. The pictures in the book seemed to come alive. I could see how big dinosaurs really were. I was glad the skeletons didn't move. I wondered how people know so much about dinosaurs. How do they know what dinosaurs looked like if they never saw one? How do they know dinosaurs ever existed?

For a long time, people didn't know. Then they began to find fossils. Fossils are the remains of animals and plants that died long ago. The animals and plants were preserved in mud or sand and slowly turned to stone. People found fossil shells, leaves, and fish. They found fossils of creatures that no longer exist. The fossils were clues to the distant past, long before human beings appeared on earth. The more fossils people found, the more curious they became.

In 1822, in England, Mary Ann Mantell spotted some strange, giant fossil teeth in a pile of rocks near a quarry. She showed them to her husband, a doctor who collected fossils. Dr. Gideon Mantell had never seen such teeth. What an exciting find! He searched the quarry. He found a few more teeth and some bones. What giant did they belong to? No one knew.

Dr. Mantell had his ideas and wrote them down. He said the teeth and bones belonged to a giant, plant-eating reptile that lived during the Mesozoic era, millions of years ago. He could tell its age from the rock the teeth and bones were buried in. He drew the animal as he thought it looked. He named it lguanodon, which means iguana tooth.