History of the discovery of the dinosaurs
The history of the discovery of dinosaurs summarizes the findings and research that led to today's understanding of dinosaurs . Dinosaur fossils are now known from all continents - including Antarctica - and come from rock layers that are between 66 and 245 million years old. The birds are considered the direct descendants of the dinosaurs, so they are the only descendants of these creatures today. Dinosaur fossils have been found for thousands of years. In China, for example, they were interpreted as dragon bones and could have provided the material for the griffin saga. Scientific research on dinosaurs began in England in the 19th century. The group name 'Dinosauria' was coined in 1842 by the anatomist Richard Owen , under whom he combined three genera at the time . In the second half of the 19th century, especially from North America, a large number of genres were described, which came to light through the famous " bone wars " that were fought between the two rivals Othniel Marsh and Edward Cope . The fossils from the excavation campaigns in the Tendaguru formation from 1909 to 1911 in what was then German East Africa and their research are among the most important finds of dinosaurs not only for the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin , but also internationally. Today, important discoveries are being made in many other regions of the world, including India , Argentina , Madagascar , Antarctica, and especially China . Since the 1970s, research on dinosaurs has been carried out intensively in the course of the dinosaur renaissance.
Many important discoveries also come from Germany - several excavation projects are currently underway. The following text therefore focuses on the finds and their research in Germany.
Early discoveries
Dinosaur fossils have been found hundreds, probably thousands of years ago, although their true nature was not recognized. It is possible that fossil footsteps first received human attention long before fossil bones were considered. Research by the French paleontologist Paul Ellenberger on the South African San revealed that they were very familiar with dinosaur traces - they even made drawings of the trace producers that look similar to iguanodonts. A South American people had carved symbols into the rock of the three-toed tracks left by theropod dinosaurs showing gigantic birds. Trittsiegel in the Rhine Valley in Germany could have influenced the Nibelung saga with Siegfried the dragon slayer . In ancient China, fossils were found around 2000 years ago, which Chang Qu described as dragon bones and which may have come from dinosaurs. Ancient steppe peoples may have conceived the griffin saga based on finds of Protoceratops bones in the wastelands of Central Asia.
In 1677, Robert Plot , the first curator of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, England, described the unusually large fragment of a femur that was discovered in a quarry near Cornwell, Oxfordshire . Plot first suspected that it was the bones of an elephant who had come to Britain with the Romans. However, when elephant bones were found to look completely different, Plot noticed an apparent resemblance to human bones and attributed the bones to a giant from the biblical pre-flood. The find was lost today, but a drawing can be used to identify the bone as the lower end of a Megalosaurus thigh bone .
19th century
Discoveries in England and the first description of the dinosaurs
The first to know about and research a group of prehistoric giant reptiles was the English doctor Gideon Mantell . As early as 1820, his wife Mary Mantell found the first fossil tooth, which he named Iguanodon a few years later and after other discoveries .
However, the first dinosaur recognized and described as such was identified from a fragment of a jaw with teeth that the amateur paleontologist William Buckland found near Oxford . The animal, first mentioned in an article published by James Parkinson in 1822, was named Megalosaurus bucklandi ("Buckland's giant lizard"). The animal was imagined as a gigantic, waran-like creature running on four legs .
Buckland, however, was not so interested in these giant lizards, but rather looked for evidence of the Biblical Flood. According to his ideas, this new science of primeval beings, called "underground science" by Buckland, had to be brought into harmony with the church so that it would find recognition in the then strictly religious Europe. It was not until he read an article by Gideon Mantell in 1824 that he mentioned the fossilized teeth, which he now called Iguanodon , that Buckland saw his fame of having discovered the first giant reptile at risk and published a more extensive scientific description of the Megalosaurus himself .
In 1825 Gideon Mantell also published the description of the Iguanodon . He derived the name from the iguana- like teeth, translated Iguanodon means "iguana tooth". Although he had already found bones and not just teeth around 1820, he still ascribed these finds to an ichthyosaurus .
The term Dinosauria was coined by another, the English anatomist Richard Owen . In 1842 he merged Megalosaurus and Iguanodon with another genus, Hylaeosaurus , into a group he named Dinosauria.
First discoveries in America and the "Bone Wars"
In 1858, the first almost complete dinosaur skeleton was discovered in North America . William Parker Foulke heard about the discovery of a worker in the marl a farm near Haddonfield ( New Jersey had found) bones. He quickly realized the importance of this find. The anatomist Joseph Leidy , who examined the animal more closely, named it in honor of the discoverer Hadrosaurus foulkii . To the surprise of many researchers, the find also showed that this dinosaur was probably walking on two legs. Foulke's find triggered a veritable dinomania in the United States.
In the years that followed, an enmity began between two famous dinosaur researchers, Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh , which escalated into the famous " Bone Wars ". Perhaps the argument began in 1870 when Cope received sharp criticism from Marsh for placing the skull of the newly discovered, strange marine reptile Elasmosaurus on the wrong end of the body. This started the two researchers' resentment and jealousy and an argument that only ended 30 years after Cope's death in 1897. Each of the two opponents and his team tried to find more and more dinosaur bones than the other - by all means. They mutually destroyed many bone finds, other bones also fell victim to the dynamite with which bones were then blasted free. The result of the rivalry was 142 newly discovered dinosaur species, of which Marsh contributed 86 species and Cope 56 species. Since then, dinosaur fossils have been found all over the world.
During this time, many dinosaur genera and species were named several times, partly by the respective competitor or also in an effort to discover as many species as possible, and by a hasty approach by one of the opponents.
Although dinosaurs were initially thought of as lively, agile animals, that picture was changed by the discoveries of Marsh and Cope. Increasingly, dinosaurs were thought of as slow and clumsy creatures. Marsh even described a sauropod as a Morosaurus ("stupid lizard") because of its head, which appears ridiculously small compared to its body size . However, because Cope first described this genus, its name Camarasaurus is used today. It was only in the 1970s that scientific opinion began to approach the original image of lively, active animals.
Discoveries in Germany: Plateosaurus , Stenopelix and Compsognathus
The first dinosaur to be discovered in Germany was discovered in 1834, a few years before the Dinosauria group was described. The bones were discovered by the Nuremberg doctor Friedrich Engelhardt in a clay pit east of Nuremberg in layers of the late Triassic . Engelhardt left the bones to Hermann von Meyer , who is now considered the founder of vertebrate paleontology in Germany. Meyer described the find for the first time in 1837 under the name Plateosaurus engelhardti and noted that it was related to the Iguanodon and Megalosaurus from England . In 1847 an almost complete but skullless Plateosaurus skeleton appeared in Degerloch near Stuttgart . Although Theodor Plieninger first attributed it to Belodon (a phytosaur ) in 1857 , Friedrich von Huene later referred to it as Gresslyosaurus plieningeri , which is now a synonym with Plateosaurus . The paleontologist Friedrich August von Quenstedt attributed other bones that were discovered near Tübingen in 1856 to the Zanclodon in 1867 - this name is also invalid today and is identical to Plateosaurus . The name "Swabian Lindwurm" for the Plateosaurus , which was popular in the past but is now out of date, also comes from Quenstedt . In the following years , many more Plateosaurus finds, especially from Baden-Württemberg, were examined, most of which were first described under the names Belodon , Gresslyosaurus or Zanclodon .
Another find emerged in 1855 from the Obernkirchen sandstone from the Harrl , a ridge of the Bückeberge in Lower Saxony, and was described by Meyer in 1857 as Stenopelix valdensis . It is a partial skeleton without a skull, which comes from the Wealden and thus belongs to the early Cretaceous ( Berriasium ). The systematic classification caused difficulties. It was not until 1887 that Ernst Koken assigned the find to the dinosaurs, but the precise classification remained controversial. Franz Baron von Nopcsa established his own family Stenopelyxidae in 1917, but later thought the animal was a hypsilophodontid . Today, Stenopelix is mostly considered to be the original representative of the Pachycephalosauria .
In 1859 Johann Andreas Wagner described the Compsognathus longipes , a small carnivore that the collector Joseph Oberndorfer found in the Solnhofen limestone limestone in Lower Bavaria. The find is an almost complete skeleton, but Wagner called it a lizard - it was not until 1896 that Othniel Marsh confirmed that it belonged to the dinosaurs. The quarry from which the fossil originated is not known, as Oberndorfer kept it a secret - but it could be the place where it was found in a quarry near Riedenburg . The Solnhofen limestone limestone, a fossil deposit that is unique in the world , is particularly known for the ancient bird Archeopteryx . A more recent find, described in 2001, is the equally primitive bird Wellnhoferia grandis .
20th century
In 1902, the fossil collector Barnum Brown found a huge partial skeleton in Montana , USA, which Henry Osborn described in 1905 as Tyrannosaurus rex . For a long time, this giant, up to fourteen meters long and weighing six tons, was considered the largest carnivorous land animal. In the following years, the large sites on the Red Deer River in Alberta were discovered, where the horn dinosaur Styracosaurus was found, among other things .
In 1909 the Berlin Museum of Natural History started a large expedition under the direction of Werner Janensch to German East Africa , today's Tanzania . The destination was a small place called Tendaguru , from which finds had already been reported. Among the spectacular finds that this expedition produced were the Kentrosaurus (a stegosaur ) and the skeletons of the Brachiosaurus . The finds can be viewed today in the Berlin Museum of Natural History; a Brachiosaurus skeleton made up of the bones of several individuals is the largest assembled dinosaur skeleton in the world.
Between 1911 and 1914, the German researcher Ernst Freiherr Stromer von Reichenbach and his German and Egyptian team discovered the fossil remains of three carnivorous theropod dinosaurs in the Egyptian Bahariyya oasis : Bahariasaurus , Carcharodontosaurus and Spinosaurus . In the 1930s he found bones of the herbivorous "elephant-foot dinosaur" (sauropod) Aegyptosaurus . Stromer described Spinosaurus (thorn lizard) in 1915, Carcharodontosaurus (because of the similarity of the teeth with those of the giant shark Carcharodon) in 1931, Aegyptosaurus in 1932 and Bahariasaurus in 1934 (lizard from Bahariyya).
An American expedition found skeletons and nests with eggs from Protoceratops in Inner Mongolia , as well as the skeletons of a Protoceratops and a Velociraptor , which were in the middle of a fight and were probably caught by a sandstorm.
In the middle of the 20th century, large amounts of dinosaur fossils were found, especially in China. Among them was the extremely long-necked sauropod Mamenchisaurus .
Discoveries from Germany
Plateosaurus and other Prosauropod finds
The largest dinosaur excavations in Germany were carried out in Trossingen (Baden-Württemberg) and Halberstadt (Saxony-Anhalt) and unearthed countless Plateosaurus finds. From Trossingen alone, 750,000 cubic meters of earth were removed during three large excavations over an area of 80,000 square meters; a total of almost 100 finds were made, including 35 complete or almost complete skeletons. The first Trossingen excavation (1911–1912) was headed by the German paleontologist Eberhard Fraas , who was made aware of the site through a metatarsal bone that children had discovered while playing. The second excavation (1921–1923) was led by Friedrich von Huene and co-financed by the American Museum of Natural History in New York , which also received a skeleton. The third and last excavation in 1932, led by Reinhold Seemann, came to an end shortly before the official end of the excavation when a worker was killed by a rock fall and another injured.
In Halberstadt, workers in a clay pit in a brick factory became aware of a skeleton that had been blown up. Some bones were sent to the paleontologist Otto Jaekel, who started the excavations in 1909. From 1923 Werner Janensch took over the management of further excavations; the last finds were made in 1937 and 1938 under the direction of August Hemprich. Altogether between 39 and 50 skeletons come from Halberstadt, although many were destroyed in a bomb attack on Berlin in 1943.
In addition to these two major sites, there are many other Plateosaurus finds in Germany; Almost 20 sites are known in Baden-Württemberg alone, most of which are to the east of Nuremberg. Noteworthy, for example, is a bone store in Ellingen , which was discovered while a house was being built; Another find was made in 1988 when the Rhine-Main-Danube Canal was being built.
Another common prosauropod in Germany is Sellosaurus , which was first described by Huene in 1908 using a partial skeleton. Another find was described as Efraasia , which was later considered a juvenile Sellosaurus for a long time . Today the genus Sellosaurus is considered invalid: The species Sellosaurus gracilis is assigned to the Plateosaurus ( Plateosaurus gracilis ), while Efraasia recently got back the status of its own genus with the species Efraasia minor . The plateosaur finds from Germany were ignored for a long time, only in the last 30 years there have been intensive studies, whereby the species Plateosaurus engelhardti is one of the best known dinosaurs today.
More bone finds
In addition to prosauropods, predators from the Triassic of Germany have also been detected. In 1908 Huene described Halticosaurus longotarsus on the basis of scanty remains that were discovered near Pfaffenhofen in Stromberg (Baden-Württemberg), and in 1932 and 1933 Hugo Rühle von Lilienstern found two partial skeletons near Hildburghausen (Thuringia). The two partial skeletons, which to this day represent the most complete finds of larger theropods in Germany, were described by Huene in honor of Lilienstern as Halticosaurus liliensterni . A squashed skull was also discovered in Stromberg in 1921 and described as the third Halticosaurus species as Halticosaurus orbitoangulatus . However, recent studies show that Halticosaurus orbitoangulatus is a crocodile and Halticosaurus liliensterni is a separate species; Welles (1984) described it as Liliensternus liliensterni . Other finds, including bones from Halberstadt, could also belong to Liliensternus .
Further finds from the Triassic period include Procompsognathus from Baden-Württemberg and Avipes from Thuringia. Procompsognathus was described by Eberhard Fraas in 1913 using two fossil-bearing rock blocks that were found in the Stubensandstein in 1909 . Paul Sereno and Rupert Wild (1991) considered the find to be a chimera - only the remaining skeleton can be assigned to a Syntarsus- like theropod, while the skull must be assigned to the crocodile relative Saltoposuchus . It was later revealed that both parts of the skeleton probably belonged to the same animal. The systematic classification of Procompsognathus is still controversial - David Allen (2004) comes to the conclusion that it was not a dinosaur, but a more basal ornithodira . Avipes (Huene, 1932) is known for its metatarsal bones, but its status as a dinosaur is controversial.
In 1963, bones from the early Jurassic were discovered in a clay pit near Greifswald ( Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania ) , which the head of the pit gave to the student Werner Ernst. The find, which consists of a skull and a few other bones, came to the University of Greifswald, but was only described by Hartmut Haubold in 1991 as Emausaurus ernsti . Today Emausaurus is often considered a primitive Thyrephore , which neither belongs to the ankylosaurs nor to the stegosaurs ; however, it could also have been a primitive representative of the stegosauria. Another find was made in 1982 in the Wiehengebirge ( North Rhine-Westphalia ): Together with the bones of the giant fish Leedsichthys , some bones were found that were ascribed to the stegosaur Lexovisaurus - but this assignment could not be confirmed by recent studies.
A fossil known as the plesiosaur humerus was exhibited in the Museum Hauff in Holzmaden , which was found in the Posidonia schist near Ohmden . However, the paleontologist Rupert Wild recognized that it was the right hind leg of a small sauropod, and described the find in 1978 as Ohmdenosaurus liasicus . Until today this primitive sauropod could not be classified more precisely. At least one vertebral bone of another sauropod comes from layers of the late Jurassic from northern Bavaria and is traditionally assigned to the Cetiosauriscus .
In the years 1980 to 1982 an important excavation took place in Nehden in the Sauerland (North Rhine-Westphalia), during which the bones of 15 to 20 individuals of the Iguanodon could be recovered. In addition to the more common species Iguanodon atherfieldensis , Iguanodon bernissartensis was also detected, and the discovery of a young animal is also remarkable. Even before the excavation, the pit was popular with mineral collectors, who also found the first bones. The finds were scientifically processed by David Norman , who also found evidence of possible hypsilophodonts and theropods.
Footprint finds from Germany
Footprints of dinosaurs from the Triassic can be found particularly in Franconia , where the traces of many small theropods have been found. The Ichnogenus (trace genus) Coelurosaurichnus is characteristic . Another area with trace occurrences is Baden-Württemberg, where traces of small theropod dinosaurs (here the Ichnogenus Grallator ) also predominate. The teacher Wilhelm Obermeyer found particularly well-preserved tracks near Stuttgart . In 1912 he discovered a unique plate measuring six square meters with over 100 footprints, which was lost in a bombing raid in World War II - today only fragments and a sketch of this find exist.
The dinosaur tracks from Barkhausen near Bad Essen ( Lower Saxony ) are an important natural monument of the late Jurassic . On an almost vertical rock face, several tracks of large theropods and sauropods can be seen.
The largest area of discovery for dinosaur tracks, however, lies in the sandstone deposits of the Lower Saxon Cretaceous. The earliest finds date from around 1840 and come from layers of the Berriasian . The tracks of Münchehagen that were uncovered in 1980 became particularly well known : in addition to the sauropod tracks , which are surrounded by a visitor center , in 2004 a new track was discovered near the old site with wonderfully distinctive impressions that are attributed to the herbivore Iguanodon and carnivorous theropods . (See: Saurierfährten Münchehagen ). Countless other Iguanodon traces come from the sandstone of Lower Saxony and are recovered when the sandstone is extracted. Many slabs with traces were destroyed at the beginning of the 20th century due to lack of interest or even used for road construction. The most important trace collector was the senior teacher Max Ballerstedt , who had founded an important collection in the Adolfinum Bückeburg high school . Among other things, the trace of a very large theropod ( Bueckeburgichnus ) and the traces that were assigned to ankylosaurs ( Metatetrapous ) were described from the Bückeberg . In 2007, the dinosaur tracks of Obernkirchen were found here, which, like the finds made in Münchehagen since 2004, are still being uncovered and examined today.
21st century
The areas of the world from which most of the new finds are currently reported are primarily China and Argentina . China unique finds are feathered dinosaurs, such as the 2000 discovered Microraptor gui , both on the arms and on the legs contour feathers possessed. This leads some researchers to suggest that this four-winged theropod may have slipped from tree to tree.
New discoveries from Germany
From the Jurassic period, dinosaur bones have been found since 1998, particularly in Oker , in the Harz region in Lower Saxony . To date, the excavation team has recovered over 100 tons of bone-bearing rock, including the bones of at least eleven sauropod individuals. Even one of their skulls was recovered, a great rarity and the first such find in Europe. The finds were scientifically described in 2006 under the name Europaaurus holgeri . This species is the smallest sauropod known to date; its small size is explained by the process of island dwarfing known from recent animals and is the best-documented case of dinosaurs so far.
In March 2006, a new, almost complete find from Schamhaupten (Bavaria) was described. The small, only 65 cm long theropod was named Juravenator starki .
In a sand-lime quarry in the Wiehengebirge near Minden (North Rhine-Westphalia), theropod bones were discovered in the ornate clay formation of the callovium in 1998 , which were described in 2016 as the new genus and species Wiehenvenator albati . The found subadult specimen with an estimated length of about nine meters represents the largest predatory dinosaur found in Germany and one of the largest in Europe.
Individual evidence
- ↑ William Sarjeant: The earliest discoveries , 1997. In: The Complete Dinosaur , edited by James Farlow and Brett-Surman, Indiana University Press, pp. 3-11. ISBN 0-253-21313-4
- ^ Adrienne Mayor: The First Fossil Hunters. Paleontology in Greek and Roman Times . Princeton University Press, Princeton 2001, ISBN 0-691-08977-9 , pp. 15-53 (Chapter 1. The Gold-Guarding Griffin: A Paleontological Legend )
- ↑ David Norman: Dinosaurs! , 1991. Boxtree Limited, London.
- ↑ Reference to the section "Early Finds and the Description of the Dinosaurs": Deborah Cadbury, 2000: Dinosaurier Jäger , Rowohlt Verlag, ISBN 3-498-00924-9
- ↑ a b Weishampel, Dodson, Osmólska: The Dinosauria , 2004, University of California Press, ISBN 978-0-520-25408-4
- ↑ Justin Tweet: Sauropodomorpha. ( Memento of April 1, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Thescelosaurus.com (accessed June 26, 2013).
- ^ David Allen (2004): "The phylogenetic status of Procompsognathus revisited." Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology (Abstracts), 24 (3): 34A
- ↑ Rupert Wild: A sauropod remnant (Reptilia, Saurischia) from the Posidonia schist (Lias, Toarcium) from Holzmaden . In: State Museum for Natural History, Stuttgart, Series B (Geology and Paleontology), No. 41, 1978
- ↑ Chatterjee, S., and Templin, RJ (2007). "Biplane wing planform and flight performance of the feathered dinosaur Microraptor gui ." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , 104 (5): 1576-1580. ( PDF )
- ↑ Oliver WM Rauhut, Tom R. Hübner, Klaus-Peter Lanser: A new megalosaurid theropod dinosaur from the late Middle Jurassic (Callovian) of north-western Germany: Implications for theropod evolution and faunal turnover in the Jurassic . In: Palaeontologia Electronica . 8, No. 1, August 2016, pp. 1-65. ISSN 1094-8074 . doi : 10.26879 / 654 .
literature
- Ernst Probst and Raymund Windolf: Dinosaurs in Germany , C. Bertelsmann, Munich, 1993, ISBN 3-570-02314-1