Daily Dino Fact: Dragon or Dinosaur?
Thursday, December 3rd, 2009
Dinosaur?
Q: What were dinosaurs called before they were called dinosaurs? HaleyN
A: Dinosaurs have been called many things before people realized what the actually were. Humans have been finding dinosaur bones for thousands of years but it wasn’t until the 1600’s when people started thinking, shall we say, more accurately about them.
The Chinese believed them to be dragon bones and used them in traditional medicines. During the Jin Dynasty (265-420 AD), Zhang Qu writes of the discovery of such bones as dragons. Dragons have long been a symbol of Chinese culture, something the discovery of dinosaur bones surely influenced.
In Europe, people believed that the bones were the remains of creatures or giants that had been killed during the Biblical Great Flood. During the 1600s, people started scientifically describing the remains they had found and recognized them as belonging to an extinct animal. It wasn’t until Sir Richard Owen coined the term “dinosaur” in 1842 that we had a modern name for them.
-Rex
