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Dinosaurs inhabited our planet for 160 million years and it was at the end of the Cretaceous, about 65 million years ago, that their mass extinction took place.
Since time immemorial, humanity has stumbled upon fossil remains of these extinct animals that it was unable to identify correctly, on many occasions they did not even formulate scientific hypotheses about their origin and in other cases they were the most outlandish.
It must be borne in mind that, for centuries, the remains found had to fit in with the biblical account. Thus, for example, when seashells were found on a mountain, it was quite easy to find a plausible explanation, the finding could be framed within the Flood universal. But, of course, when bone remains were discovered, it was assumed that it must be some exceptionally large animal that still inhabited the Earth, because according to the Catholic religion, no being conceived by God could become extinct.
The testicles of a giant
Throughout the seventeenth century one theory became especially famous – the formative life– which explained that the organic origin of fossils was due to attempts or whims of rocks to imitate life.
In 1677 a femur was discovered in a limestone quarry in Oxfordshire (England) and was interpreted as a ‘petrified remains of an elephant or a human giant’. the english reverend Robert Plot (1640-1696) described the find in his book ‘Natural History of Oxfodshire’ and thought it was the skeletal remains of an elephant brought by the Romans during their invasion of the British Isles. He later reformulated his theory and thought he saw in that bone the remains of one of the patriarchs of the Bible.
Swiss physician and naturalist Johann Jakob Scheuchzer (1672-1733) described in 1726 a fossil specimen from the Bavarian town of Öhningen that he identified as Man of the flood witness, that is, the ‘witness man of the Flood’. The doctor thought it was a man who had died drowned during the Universal Deluge.
the naturalist Richard Brookes (1721-1763) took up the discovery of Oxfordshire in 1763 and defended that those really were some petrified human genitaliaso he decided to baptize the fossil remains with the name of human scrotum. With the eyes of current science, that distal fragment of the femur belonged to a huge theropod dinosaur, probably a Megalosaurus.
You don’t have to look for the living among the dead
In 1770 the French anatomist George Cuvier (1769-1832) finally defended the theory that some species had disappeared forever from the face of the Earth. In a quarry located in Maastrich (Holland) he found fossil jaws of a huge animal, which Cuvier identified as an extinct marine lizard which he named Mosasaurus. In this way, Cuvier broke with the established order.
In 1811 he analyzed the Man of the flood witness and concluded that they were the remains of a salamander and not a human being. It is currently in the Teylers Museum in Haarlem (The Netherlands) and has been renamed Andrias scheuchzeri in homage to the historical error.
In the 1820s an obstetrician and naturalist, Gideon Mantell (1790-1852), found some large teeth that, according to him, must have corresponded to a gigantic herbivorous lizard, which he named Iguanodon.
The birth of the word ‘dinosaur’ would still take a while to arrive. It was coined in 1841 by the British paleontologist Richard Owen (1804-1892), for this he used two Greek words: deinos (terrible) and sauros (lizard). And it is that, as the scientist said, those extraordinary animals were nothing more than ‘terrible lizards’.
Pedro Gargantilla is an internist at El Escorial Hospital (Madrid) and the author of several popular books.
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