All posts by michelle.underhill

British geologist and paleontologist Gideon Mantell is famous for his contributions to the scientific discovery of dinosaurs. In 1825, he described and validly named the second dinosaur genus, Iguanodon. In 1833, he described another dinosaur, which was later used, along with Iguanodon and Megalosaurus, to define Dinosauria. A gunpowder explosion at a quarry in Tilgate Forest, West Sussex, revealed a collection of about fifty fossil bone pieces that were acquired by Mantell in 1832. Mantell discovered that the pieces could be combined into a single, partially articulated skeleton, the most complete dinosaur skeleton known at the time.

The Dino Lab at the Natural History Museum, Los Angeles County, is a busy place. The lab is responsible for cleaning and repairing the fossils uncovered by its paleontologists, sculpting missing bones to help fill in fossil gaps, and photographing and archiving the fossils held at the museum. It offers an incredible opportunity for museum visitors to get a true picture of what it takes to prepare a fossil for further research or display in a museum. How would you like to get a behind-the-scenes tour of the Dino Lab at NHMLA? Well, you’re in luck!

The second validly-named dinosaur was Iguanodon, but the identification of its fossils as a distinct and extinct species was a somewhat long and arduous process. In 1822, Gideon Mantell, English geologist and paleontologist, came into possession of some large fossil teeth, discovered either by himself or his wife, Mary Ann.

Pterosaurs, flying reptiles that lived 228-66 million years ago, are the earliest vertebrates known to have evolved the capacity for powered flight. The first known pterosaur specimen was described by Cosimo Alessandro Collini in 1784. Twenty years earlier, in 1764, Collini had been appointed to supervise the Naturalienkabinett at Mannheim, established as part of the Kurpfälzische Academy of Sciences, in present-day Germany. The first-known pterosaur specimen arrived at Mannheim sometime between 1767 and 1784, probably originating from Bovaria. Collini was baffled by the specimen, but deduced that it was not a bird or a bat.

When the fossils of extinct species were first discovered, they were often misidentified. Case in point: Ichthyosaurs. The first probable illustrations of ichthyosaur fossils were published by Edward Lhuyd in his Lithophylacii Brittannici Ichnographia, 1699. He attributed the fossils to fish. In 1708, Swiss naturalist Johann Jakob Scheuchzer attributed two ichthyosaur vertebrae to a man who drowned during the Biblical flood. In 1783, an ichthyosaur jaw with teeth was exhibited by the Society for Promoting Natural History as those of a crocodilian.

If you’ve seen Jurassic World (or even just the trailers), then you’re familiar with Mosasaurus.

Most people today are at least somewhat familiar with the order of extinct marine reptiles known as Plesiosauria, thanks to the legend of the Loch Ness monster, which is often described as resembling a plesiosaur. Indeed, some argue that Nessie may in fact be a surviving member of this order. Scientists, however, reject this suggestion, if for no other reason that the Loch Ness lake formed a mere 10,000 years ago, while the fossil record indicates that plesiosaurs went extinct over 66 million years ago. And yet, even if plesiosaurs can’t account for the Loch Ness legend, the story of their discovery is still captivating. Plesiosaurs are among the first extinct fossil reptiles to be recognized as such.