The thigh bone pictured in Professor Robert Plot’s book The Natural History of Oxfordshire was the first dinosaur discovery ever documented.
The thigh bone pictured in Professor Robert Plot’s book The Natural History of Oxfordshire was the first dinosaur discovery ever documented.
It was found in a quarry near Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire, and was sent to Plot, head of the world’s oldest museum — the Ashmolean in Oxford.
He had no idea what the bone was and it has since been lost. But from the picture it appears to be from a Megalosaurus — one of the biggest of the reptiles that dominated the planet from about 260 million years ago to their sudden extinction 65 million years ago.
Major dinosaur discoveries and studies really only began in the early 1800s — 130 years after Plot’s book — when the bones of another Megalosaurus and an Iguanodon were found in England.
About the same time, a young girl called Mary Anning discovered some of the first Ichthyosaur fossils in Lyme Regis, Dorset.
By 1842 the term dinosaur, meaning “terrible lizard”, had been coined by the scientist Sir Richard Owen.
More complete skeletons were then found in the American state of New Jersey and the hunt for dinosaur remains spread around the world.
A host of new varieties were discovered. They ranged from the ferocious meat-eaters Tyrannosaurus Rex and Velociraptor to the vegetarian Stegosaurus and Triceratops.
Modern paleontologists are making new finds all the time.
In 1983 a major new discovery, of a Baryonyx, was made in Surrey.
So far 350 dinosaur varieties have been unearthed, on all the continents of the world.
But scientists believe that is less than ten per cent of all the types that existed during the three main ages of the dinosaur — the Triassic, the Jurassic and the Cretaceous periods.
Controversy still rages over how dinosaurs became extinct.
Some scientists believe their population dwindled due to environmental changes.
But there is increasing evidence that they were wiped out when a giant asteroid or comet struck the Earth 65 million years ago.
It caused a widespread inferno, acid rain and a dust cloud which blocked out the sun for months.
That destroyed plants, the herbivorous dinosaurs which ate them — and the carnivorous dinosaurs which ate the herbivores.
The theory is supported by the discovery in 1991 of a buried crater 125 miles wide in the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico.
It is thought to have been caused by a gigantic asteroid.
Scientists have dated it to 65 million years ago — the same time the dinosaurs were wiped out.
Nell and Charles
Nell Gwyn was an attractive, vivacious actress who was the mistress of King Charles II for about 16 years and had two sons with him.
From humble origins, she spent her childhood selling oranges outside London’s Drury Lane Theatre. She became an actress at 15 and rose to stardom thanks partly to roles written for her by the playwright John Dryden.
Nell became Charles’s lover as a 19-year-old in 1669 and remained so until he died in 1685. She died two years later. Nell is said to have persuaded the King to build the Royal Hospital in Chelsea, London, for army pensioners.
