A SPONTANEOUS BARRAGE OF EXPLETIVES rang through the air, bringing my coworkers scrambling over the hill. Madagascar’s sweltering midday heat no longer mattered. There before me, beneath a clod of freshly dislodged sediment, were four shining teeth, exposed to the light of day for the first time in more than 65 million years. Most kids could have confirmed that these sharp, recurved, chocolate brown objects, each topped with fine serrations, once lined the mouth of a meat-eating dinosaur, a theropod. Best of all, these teeth were still attached to a jawbone. Further digging revealed a complete and undistorted jaw, with every tooth in place. Over the next couple of days we found more bones of the same, exceptionally preserved skull—part of the eye socket, another jaw with teeth, a gnarly bone from the nose region. Soon it became clear that most of the skull was buried here, although the individual bones had fallen apart and now lay strewn over several square meters. We could barely contain our excitement. Field paleontology relies as much on serendipity as on know-how and hard work, and the fates had smiled down upon us. Yet, as more and more bones of the ancient predator were unearthed, we began to get nervous. A key portion of the skull remained missing, leaving a mystery unsolved. <...>

There has been a long and distinguished tradition of tracking dinosaurs and other extinct animals in Europe. This tradition dates back to the first scientific report on a set of Permian fossil footprints from Scotland in 1828, which were at first incorrectly interpreted as the spoor of tortoises. This tradition of early track discoveries, and confusion over the trackmakers, continued in the 1830s with the discovery of the controversial Triassic “hand animal” footprint named Chirotherium. Although this was the first fossil footprint ever given a formal Latin name, it was not attributed to the proper trackmaker for almost a century. Even so, some of the leading paleontologists and geologists of the day paid considerable and serious attention to fossil footprints, knowing full well that they shed new light on the history of vertebrates that could not be obtained from the sparse record of bones then available. <...>

IN 1842, British comparative anatomist Richard Owen (1804–1892) coined the word dinosaur. Owen constructed this word from the Greek words deinos, meaning “terrible” (though Owen considered it to mean “fearfully great”), and sauros, meaning “lizard” or “reptile.” To Owen, the “fearfully great lizards” were large, extinct reptiles known from only a handful of fossils discovered in western Europe since the 1820s. Today, dinosaur fossils are known from all continents and represent hundreds of distinct types of dinosaurs.
In this chapter, I briefly answer some basic questions about dinosaurs and introduce some topics discussed at greater length in this book.

The discovery of dinosaurs and other large extinct ‘saurians’, a term under which the Victorians commonly lumped ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs, pterosaurs and their kin, makes exciting reading. The story of how early ‘fossilists’ first found the remains of these ‘primeval monsters’ has been told again and again in popular and semi-popular books about the history of palaeontology. Mary Anning making a living by collecting extinct reptiles along the Dorset coast, William Buckland and Gideon Mantell finding the ‘terrible lizards’ for which Richard Owen was to coin the word ‘Dinosauria’, O. C. Marsh and E. D. Cope fighting over new fossil vertebrates in the American West – all of these well-known stories have almost achieved the status of legends, and have often been retold with little regard for historical or scientific accuracy. <...>