What was the first dinosaur discovered?

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People have likely been finding fossilized dinosaur bones for thousands of years, but for a very long time, they didn’t know what they were! Imagine that you found a big dinosaur bone in your back yard one day, but you had never heard of dinosaurs before. What would you think when you found it?  

Around the early 1800s people began to realize that fossils they were finding belonged to a kind of animal that didn’t exist anymore (because dinosaurs went extinct about 65 million years ago!)

The first public scientific description of a dinosaur happened in 1822, when William Buckland, a geologist and a minister, wrote about megalosaurus—a big meat-eater. He had discovered some of its fossilized backbone, hip, leg, jaw and teeth! Putting the pieces together, he figured out that he had found a dinosaur! The second animal to be officially called a dinosaur was the iguanodon, a plant-eater.

Jigsaw Puzzle

Ask a grown-up if you can put together a jigsaw puzzle, but also ask the grown-up to hide the picture of what the finished puzzle will look like.  Try putting together the pieces!
How hard is it when you don’t know what the finished product will look like? This is a lot like how scientists put together the pieces of dinosaur history.  Often they only find a few bones at a time, and then they have to guess what the finished animal would look like!

Good luck with your jigsaw puzzle!