A brief history of British dinosaur discoveries...

‘Dinosaur’ and ‘Britain’ are rarely used together in the same sentence, but, if you can excuse the pun, they should really be two words set in stone.

The name ‘dinosaur’, meaning terrible (or fearfully great) lizard in Greek, was created sometime between 1841 and 1842 by the famous scientist, Sir Richard Owen – founder of the Natural History Museum in London. The very first time Owen mentioned the word in public was during a meeting in Plymouth on 20 July 1841. Hence, the very concept of dinosaurs is a British ‘invention’.

This name was coined to distinguish the remains of several large-bodied fossil ‘lizards’ discovered in the English countryside during the early 1800s. The very first was Megalosaurus, collected from slate mines in the small village of Stonesfield in Oxfordshire and described in 1824 by the Rev William Buckland. The second was Iguanodon, collected from quarries around Cuckfield in West Sussex and described in 1825 by a country doctor called Gideon Mantell.

And finally, there is the often forgotten Hylaeosaurus, also collected near Cuckfield and described in 1833, also by Mantell. Although these large ‘lizards’ were not identified as dinosaurs at the time, their descriptions represent the first scientific accounts of what can definitively be identified as dinosaurs. It was Owen, who later recognised an important link between these animals and other isolated bones, which helped him to establish the new-found group, Dinosauria. Historically, over 100 different species of dinosaur were described from remains in the British Isles, although today, palaeontologists consider approximately 50 to 60 species as valid. There are roughly 1,500 species of dinosaur known worldwide and the British representatives therefore constitute approximately 4% of all dinosaurs currently known.

The British Isles can boast one of the best dinosaur records from anywhere in the world. Dinosaurian remains have been recorded from rocks of Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous age. From the Isle of Skye to the Isle of Wight, dinosaur remains have been collected from various locations in the British Isles. It is often portrayed that almost all British dinosaurs are known from fragments, perhaps just one or two bones. Yet, some British dinosaurs represent nearly complete to complete skeletons and are arguably among the best known in the world.

Not only are the bones and teeth of dinosaurs recorded, but thousands of footprints have been found, along with fossilised dinosaur faeces, called coprolites. As many British finds were described when the science was only just evolving, this subsequently resulted with many firsts. For example, the very first description of what is now identified as a ‘raptor’ (dromaeosaur) was originally misidentified as a type of lizard in 1854. The specimen is an isolated, partial lower jaw with teeth that was collected on the Isle of Purbeck in Dorset and belongs to the dinosaur, Nuthetes destructor.