Dinosaurs and their history

William Parker Foulke discovered the Hadrosaurus foulkii in Haddonfield, New Jersey, in 1858, which was the first nearly complete dinosaur skeleton found in North America.

Sir Richard Owen, an English biologist and paleontologist, coined the term Dinosauria (meaning terrible lizard) in 1842.

Mary Ann Mantell discovered large, unusual teeth in Sussex, England, which her husband Gideon Mantell later identified as belonging to an extinct reptile he named Iguanodon.

William Buckland, a professor at Oxford, published the first scientific description of a dinosaur, Megalosaurus, in 1824.

For centuries, large fossilized bones found in China were often attributed to dragons, which are prominent figures in Chinese mythology.

The mass extinction event that wiped out the non-avian dinosaurs occurred approximately 65 to 66 million years ago at the end of the Cretaceous Period.

Dinosaurs first appeared during the Triassic Period (about 230 million years ago) and went extinct at the end of the Cretaceous Period (65 million years ago), spanning roughly 165 million years.

Sharks, crocodiles, and turtles have ancient lineages that date back to or before the time of dinosaurs. Bears, however, are mammals that evolved much later.

The earliest known dinosaurs appeared during the Triassic Period, roughly 230 million years ago.

The term dinosaur was coined by Richard Owen from the Greek words deinos (terrible or fearfully great) and sauros (lizard).