The word dinosaur was coined in 1842, and scientists have been revising their ideas ever since. Here are the famous names with the twist most people miss: a Brontosaurus erased and then restored, a Triceratops first mistaken for a bison, a dinner party held inside an Iguanodon. Here too are the people who dug them up, from a Bone Wars feud that filled a New York newspaper to a Montana crew chief who spotted a T. rex over lunch.
Every tile in a Dinosaurs game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
Giants and Grazers
nine stories
1The thunder lizard that was erased and then restored
On the tile: Brontosaurus1879 and 2015
Brontosaurus spent more than a century as a scientific ghost. Othniel Charles Marsh named Apatosaurus ajax in 1877, and two years later he named a larger skeleton Brontosaurus excelsus, the noble thunder lizard. In 1903 Elmer Riggs argued the two were too similar to be separate, and because Apatosaurus was named first, Brontosaurus lost. The public kept using the name anyway, in films, on logos and on postage stamps. Then a 2015 study of 477 anatomical features in 81 specimens concluded Brontosaurus was distinct after all. Not every paleontologist agrees.
One of London's best-loved museum exhibits began with a royal hint. King Edward VII saw a sketch of a Diplodocus while visiting Andrew Carnegie at his Scottish castle and remarked how much he would like one for the Natural History Museum. Carnegie commissioned a plaster replica of his own dinosaur. Its 292 bones arrived in 36 packing cases, and Dippy was unveiled on May 12, 1905. It spent World War II taken apart in the basement, had its tail raised over visitors' heads in 1993, and left the museum's main hall in January 2017 to make way for a blue whale.
3A giant named to thank the family that owns its ranch
On the tile: Patagotitan2010
In 2010, a worker at La Flecha Ranch in Patagonia, Argentina, spotted an enormous bone poking out of the ground. Scientists who came to dig found hundreds of bones from at least six of these titanosaurs, and in 2017 they named it Patagotitan mayorum, honoring the Mayo family who own the ranch. Its thigh bone alone is 2.38 meters, nearly 8 feet, long. A cast went on display at New York's American Museum of Natural History in early 2016. At 122 feet long, it has to poke its head out of the exhibit hall's entryway to fit.
Triceratops made its scientific debut in disguise. In 1887, Othniel Charles Marsh studied a pair of fossil horn cores and decided they came from a giant bison, which he named Bison alticornis. More remains soon showed the horns belonged to a three-horned dinosaur, and in 1889 Marsh named it Triceratops, three-horned face. The fossil horns are only bony cores; in life a keratin covering made them longer and sharper. They were not always enough. A partial Triceratops collected in 1997 has a horn bitten off, with bite marks matching Tyrannosaurus, and the horn had healed.
A popular old idea held that Stegosaurus, with its tiny head, needed a second brain in its hips. The theory arose because its brain was small, roughly the size of a plum, and early scientists noticed an enlarged space in the spinal canal over the hips. Many dinosaurs had that enlargement. There may have been a cluster of nerves there, but paleontologists say it was no brain. Stegosaurus has corrected other mistakes too. Othniel Charles Marsh first thought its bony plates lay flat on its back, until a specimen held in place by mud showed they stood upright.
6The giant whose finder said sauropods lived on land
On the tile: Brachiosaurus1900
In 1900, Elmer Riggs, a scientist from Chicago, dug up bones in Colorado that he first took for Brontosaurus. He soon realized the animal was much bigger, and when he named it Brachiosaurus, arm lizard, in 1903, it was the largest dinosaur yet discovered. Its front legs were longer than its back legs, tilting it upward toward tall trees. Riggs also challenged the thinking of his day, which pictured giant sauropods spending most of their time in water to hold up their weight. He argued they lived on land, an idea largely ignored until research in the 1970s backed him.
In August 1987, the broken end of an enormous neck rib turned up at a fossil site in Xinjiang, northwestern China. It belonged to the sauropod Mamenchisaurus sinocanadorum, which lived about 160 million years ago. Only one partial skeleton has been found, so in 2023 scientists estimated the missing neck by scaling its bones against Xinjiangtitan, a relative with a complete neck. Their answer was up to 15 meters, about 49 feet, possibly the longest neck of any known dinosaur. Researchers admit they do not yet know how it held that neck up or moved air through it.
In spring 1978, Marion Brandvold, whose family owned a small rock shop in Bynum, Montana, found some small fossil bones west of Choteau. That summer Jack Horner and high school teacher Bob Makela identified them as baby duck-billed dinosaurs, and Brandvold led them to the spot, which proved to be the first dinosaur nest found with hatchlings. In 1979 they named the animal Maiasaura, good mother lizard. It later became Montana's state fossil, and studies of its bones show it reached an average adult weight of about 2.3 metric tons in eight years.
In the late 1830s, a farmer named John Estaugh Hopkins dug strange bones out of a marl pit in Haddonfield, New Jersey. About 20 years later, in 1858, lawyer William Parker Foulke learned of the find and began a new excavation at the pit. Joseph Leidy named the animal Hadrosaurus foulkii and concluded that it could stand upright on two legs. In 1868 the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia became the first place in the world where the public could see a mounted dinosaur. The crowds grew so large that the Academy started charging admission, ten cents.
SUE the T. rex was long called she, but nobody knows whether this dinosaur was female or male. The name honors Sue Hendrickson, who spotted a few large vertebrae jutting from an eroded bluff north of Faith, South Dakota, in 1990. Three parties then fought a five-year custody battle that ended in a public auction in 1997. Chicago's Field Museum won it for about $8.4 million, with support from McDonald's and the Walt Disney World Resort. Twelve preparators then spent more than 30,000 hours readying the skeleton. Growth rings in the bones suggest SUE died at 28.
On the tile: Tyrannosaurus68-66 million years agoMyth busted
In Jurassic Park, a Tyrannosaurus rex chases down an accelerating Jeep. Studies of dinosaur running speeds suggest the real animal could barely run faster than a human, with top speed estimates of about 16 to 22 kilometers per hour, roughly 10 to 14 miles per hour. That was less of a problem than it sounds, because the dinosaurs it hunted, such as Triceratops, were slow too. Its bite was another matter, three to five times as powerful as a lion's. Its famous tiny arms each ended in just two fingers, with the palms facing each other, better suited to clapping than to playing piano.
The Velociraptors of the Jurassic Park movies are scaly and about twice the size of the real thing. The actual animal was turkey-sized, about 1.8 meters long and 7 kilograms, roughly 6 feet and 15 pounds. Its first fossils, a crushed skull and a large curved claw, were found on August 11, 1923, during an American Museum of Natural History expedition to Mongolia's Gobi Desert. Henry Fairfield Osborn, who named it in 1924, assumed the claw came from the hand; it was the famous sickle claw of the foot. In 2007, quill knobs on a Velociraptor fossil proved it had long arm feathers.
4The claw that changed how scientists saw dinosaurs
On the tile: Deinonychus1964
On August 29, 1964, Yale paleontologist John Ostrom was about to wrap up a field season in Montana when he and his assistant, Grant Meyer, came across a three-inch claw sticking out of the ground. Ostrom later wrote that he nearly knocked Meyer down the slope rushing to see it. In 1969 he named the animal Deinonychus, terrible claw, and described an athletic predator that may have been warm-blooded, helping to spark a dinosaur renaissance. In the late 1980s, Michael Crichton called Ostrom for details. The raptors of Jurassic Park were modeled on Deinonychus, under the name of its relative Velociraptor.
5The Spinosaurus bones lost to a wartime bombing raid
On the tile: Spinosaurus1944
The first Spinosaurus fossils did not survive World War II. German paleontologist Ernst Stromer, whose expeditions to Egypt from 1910 to 1914 found the bones, named the dinosaur in 1915 and displayed it in Munich. During the war Stromer, a critic of the Nazi regime, begged the museum's director to move the fossils to safety. The director refused, and an Allied bombing raid destroyed them in April 1944. For decades only drawings, photographs and descriptions remained. New fossils from Morocco, including a paddle-like tail described in 2020, have led some scientists to argue it swam, though the debate continues.
Giganotosaurus came out of the ground with help from a journalist. At a paleontology conference, science writer Don Lessem came across a small, blurry photo of a giant leg bone shown by Argentine scientist Rodolfo Coria. The bone, found in the badlands of Patagonia by a dune buggy-riding mechanic, was slightly larger than a Tyrannosaurus rex leg bone. Coria said a dig would cost around $6,000, so Lessem paid for it. In 1995 the animal was named Giganotosaurus carolinii, after fossil hunter Rubén Carolini, who found the first specimen in 1993. At about 13 meters, it was probably longer but lighter than T. rex.
In Jurassic Park, Dilophosaurus is a small dinosaur that flares a neck frill and spits venom. There is no fossil evidence for either. The real animal was about 20 feet long and weighed around three-quarters of a ton, one of the largest land animals in early Jurassic North America. The film did get its double head crest right. The first specimens were found in 1940 by Jesse Williams, a Navajo man, on Navajo Nation land near Tuba City, Arizona. In 1942 he showed them to paleontologists from the University of California, Berkeley, and the best skeletons are still owned by the Navajo Nation.
8A four-winged dinosaur caught up in a fossil hoax
On the tile: MicroraptorNamed 2000
One of the first known Microraptor specimens became famous for the wrong reason. A fossil hunter in China presented a remarkable winged dinosaur, and well-known science magazines wrote about it as Archaeoraptor. Experts grew suspicious and found it was a fake, pieced together from several real fossils, including the tail of a Microraptor. The real Microraptor was about the size of a crow, with feathered wings on its legs as well as its arms. Around 300 specimens are now known. One preserved pigment cells showing shiny black feathers, and another held a complete lizard in its belly.
Therizinosaurus looks built for horror. Its name means scythe lizard, and the claws on its hands were about 50 centimeters, nearly 20 inches, long, thought to be the longest of any land animal ever. Yet this 10-meter Mongolian dinosaur ate plants. It may have used those claws to pull vegetation toward itself, or simply to make attackers think twice. For a long time scientists were unsure it was a theropod at all, and some linked it to long-necked sauropods, until smaller relatives turned up and placed it in the same broad group as Tyrannosaurus and Velociraptor.
On December 31, 1853, sculptor Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins invited about 20 guests to see in the new year inside the mold of his Iguanodon. The men climbed steps to a table set within the beast, with anatomist Richard Owen seated in the head. Owen proposed toasts around midnight, and the guests roared the chorus of a many-versed song by naturalist Edward Forbes. Hawkins had also invited the publisher of the Illustrated London News, and the press loved it. Six months later, more than 40,000 people attended the opening of the Crystal Palace park, home to the world's first full-scale dinosaur models. Most of Hawkins's sculptures still stand.
The word dinosaur is younger than the first dinosaurs to be named. By the 1830s, southern England had produced three puzzling fossil reptiles: Megalosaurus, Iguanodon and Hylaeosaurus. Anatomist Richard Owen noticed that they shared features, including vertebrae at the base of the spine that had fused together. After a speech in July 1841 that reportedly lasted two hours, he published a report in 1842 grouping them as Dinosauria. The name is usually translated as terrible lizard, but Owen described the animals as fearfully great. He later became the first superintendent of London's Natural History Museum.
3Thirty Iguanodons found deep in a Belgian coal mine
On the tile: Bernissart1878
In March 1878, coal miners digging 322 meters, more than 1,000 feet, below the surface near Bernissart, Belgium, broke into a pocket of clay full of bones crusted with pyrite, fool's gold. Over the next three years, around 30 Iguanodon skeletons came out, many of them fairly complete. Covered in plaster and split into 600 blocks, they went to Brussels, where one was assembled in a chapel, the only space with a high enough ceiling. The find gave scientists their first complete Iguanodons and moved the animal's famous spike from its nose, where earlier models had put it, to its thumbs.
In 1861, two years after Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species, a skeleton surrounded by clear feather impressions was uncovered in Germany. Archaeopteryx also had sharp teeth, a long bony tail and claws on its hands, and it was the oldest bird-like creature then known. Thomas Huxley, a great supporter of Darwin, was one of the first to see its importance and noticed similarities to meat-eating dinosaurs. More than a century later, the idea that birds evolved from dinosaurs became widely accepted. As paleontologist Daniel Field puts it, Archaeopteryx is "unambiguously a dinosaur."
On March 21, 2011, heavy-equipment operator Shawn Funk was digging at Suncor's Millennium Mine north of Fort McMurray, Alberta, when his bucket clipped something much harder than the surrounding rock. It was a nodosaur, an armored plant-eating dinosaur about 110 to 112 million years old, with fossilized skin still covering its armor. Scientists think its bloated carcass floated down a river and out to sea before sinking onto its back in soft mud. Museum preparator Mark Mitchell spent more than 7,000 hours freeing it. It is the best-preserved nodosaur ever found and the oldest dinosaur known from Alberta.
In 1980, physicist Luis Alvarez and his geologist son Walter proposed that a thin layer of iridium-rich clay, found at sites around the world, marked a giant asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs. The idea was controversial and set off a long search for the crater. A key clue came from Haiti, where in February 1990 Alan Hildebrand and David Kring measured an unusually thick deposit of impact debris, pointing to the Gulf of Mexico or Caribbean. The crater turned out to lie buried under Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula. Oil explorers had detected the structure decades earlier but interpreted it as a buried volcano.
In May 1871, a gang with sledgehammers destroyed the partly built, life-size prehistoric animal models that Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins was making for a Paleozoic Museum in New York's Central Park. The pieces were carted off and buried somewhere in the park. For generations the order was blamed on political boss William Tweed, whose allies had canceled the project in late 1870. But a 2023 study by Victoria Coules and Michael Benton, using park records and New York Times reports, found the order came from Henry Hilton, the park's treasurer and vice president, a man who also had a bronze statue painted white.
On the tile: Fighting Dinos74-70 million years ago
One of the most famous fossils from Mongolia shows two dinosaurs locked in combat. A Velociraptor has its sickle-shaped foot claw in the throat of a Protoceratops, while the raptor's arm is crushed in the Protoceratops's mouth. The pair seems to have been buried mid-struggle, probably by a sandstorm or a collapsing sand dune. It was found by the Polish-Mongolian expeditions to the Gobi Desert, and it is the most dramatic evidence yet of two dinosaurs fighting. Nobody knows who started it. Protoceratops was much bulkier, and it may even have provoked the attack.
In 2000, Bob Harmon, a field crew chief from Montana's Museum of the Rockies, was eating lunch in a remote canyon when he looked up and saw a bone sticking out of a rock wall. It was a Tyrannosaurus rex, nicknamed B. rex in his honor. Its plaster-wrapped block weighed more than 2,000 pounds, just over the helicopter's capacity, so the team split it, and a leg bone ended up in pieces. Those fragments went to Mary Schweitzer, who found medullary bone, a tissue female birds form before laying eggs. Her 2005 paper showed this T. rex was female.
1A walk, a boulder and the first dinosaur named by a woman
On the tile: Mignon Talbot1910
In 1910, Mount Holyoke College geologist Mignon Talbot was out walking with her sister, Ellen, when she spotted vertebrae and ribs in a sandstone boulder at the bottom of a gravel pit. She called her sister over to see a real fossil skeleton, not just tracks. Talbot, who held a Yale Ph.D. in geology, described the small dinosaur in 1911 as Podokesaurus holyokensis, the swift-footed lizard of Holyoke. She was the first woman to name and describe a dinosaur. A fire later burned the college's Williston Hall to the ground, destroying the only known specimen, though casts survive. In 2021, Massachusetts residents voted to make it their state dinosaur.
In August 1909, Carnegie Museum paleontologist Earl Douglass was searching for dinosaurs near Vernal, Utah, and his diary was glum. He found bones that were broken up and "nothing good," and felt discouraged. On August 17 he tried a new gulch and saw eight tailbones of an Apatosaurus in a sandstone ledge, still in position. "It was a beautiful sight," he wrote. That skeleton was mounted in Pittsburgh by 1915, the same year Dinosaur National Monument was established to protect his quarry. Douglass ran the excavations there until 1924, and his family settled on a ranch nearby.
Edward Drinker Cope, one side of the Bone Wars, made his most famous blunder on an animal that was not even a dinosaur. He described Elasmosaurus platyurus, a long sea reptile related to plesiosaurs, about 40 feet from tip to tail. Cope mixed up its neck and tail vertebrae, partly because the skull lay near what were really tail bones, so his reconstruction put the head at the end of the tail. His mentor Joseph Leidy was the first to point out the error in print. Cope's rival Othniel Charles Marsh brought it up with relish for the rest of his career.
The Bone Wars started amicably. Othniel Charles Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope met in Berlin in 1863, and in early 1868 they explored fossil beds together in Haddonfield, New Jersey. The friendship soured into a rivalry of spies, code names and, Cope charged, orders to smash fossils rather than leave them for others. Between them they named Stegosaurus, Triceratops and Diplodocus, though their haste left many species with several names that later had to be untangled. In January 1890 the New York Herald spread their accusations across its pages, under headlines like "Scientists wage bitter warfare."
Baron Franz Nopcsa grew up in a castle in Transylvania, and his interest in dinosaurs began with fossils his sister found on the family estate. The self-taught paleontologist noticed that some of the dinosaurs were fully grown yet unusually small, like the sauropod Magyarosaurus, about six meters long compared with about 26 meters for Diplodocus. He proposed that they had shrunk because they lived on an island, the first person to suggest that island dwarfism could be seen in the fossil record. Nopcsa also spied in the Balkans during World War I, crossed Europe by motorcycle and offered to become king of Albania.
Chinese paleontologist Xu Xing wanted to be an economist but was assigned to study dinosaurs, and he says he had never heard the word dinosaur before college. The subject did not grip him until 1995, when he spent weeks traveling around China's fossil collections with two British students, Paul Barrett and Paul Upchurch. Soon feathered dinosaurs began emerging from Chinese rocks, and Xu was there to study them. He has since named around 80 species, including the four-winged Microraptor and Yi qi, the dinosaur with the shortest name, making him the living person who has named the most dinosaurs.
7The great fossil hunter whose finds were not dinosaurs
On the tile: Mary Anning1811 to 1828
Mary Anning of Lyme Regis is one of history's great fossil hunters, but her most famous finds were not dinosaurs. In 1811, when Mary was 12, her brother Joseph found a strange skull, and she found most of the rest of the animal, an ichthyosaur. In December 1823 she found the first complete Plesiosaurus skeleton, and in December 1828 the first pterosaur discovered outside Germany. All were reptiles from the age of dinosaurs, but none were dinosaurs. Male scientists often used her fossils without crediting her, and the Geological Society of London did not admit women as fellows until 1908.
8The Gobi expedition leader who prized tiny mammals
On the tile: Gobi Mammals1960s to 1970s
Zofia Kielan-Jaworowska studied paleontology in war-ravaged Warsaw, attending lectures in Roman Kozlowski's apartment, and there she first dreamed of going to Mongolia. About 15 years later she organized the first Polish-Mongolian paleontological expedition to the Gobi Desert, then seven more. The expeditions found spectacular dinosaurs, but her real quarry was the tiny mammals that lived alongside them. In 1970 her team found 22 mammal skulls in ten days, and in time they collected some 180, then the largest collection of its kind. She was also the first woman on the executive committee of the International Union of Geological Sciences.
9A claw in a Surrey clay pit and a fish-eating dinosaur
On the tile: William Walker1983
In January 1983, fossil collector William J. Walker was exploring a clay pit near Ockley in Surrey, England, when he found a bit of a claw sticking out of the rock. The claw bone measured 31 centimeters, about a foot, along its outer curve. Natural History Museum scientists dug out a fairly complete skeleton that May and June and named the new dinosaur Baryonyx walkeri, heavy claw, in his honor. Its crocodile-like snout and rounded teeth pointed to a fish eater, and its stomach held fish scales and bones of a young Iguanodon. It gave scientists vital clues to how spinosaurs lived.