Dinosaurs are recognised
Richard Owen names a group of extinct reptiles, and extinction becomes vivid.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 12 years
- Known to
- ± 1 year
- Era
- Industrial, Holocene
Owen coins Dinosauria in 1842 from the fragmentary remains of Megalosaurus, Iguanodon and Hylaeosaurus. Life-size concrete models are unveiled at the Crystal Palace in 1854 — wrong in almost every detail, and still standing. Public fascination with dinosaurs does more than any argument to make the idea of a vanished deep past concrete, and the American bone rush of the 1870s turns palaeontology into a competitive spectacle.