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. <...>

Having grown up reading that birds were at most only distantly related to dinosaurs, I was both startled and fascinated when a growing number of researchers began to argue that birds were the direct descendants of the terrible lizards. At the end of the 1970s, I was becoming involved in the ar¬ gument both as an artist and a scientist. Art and science could not be separated; the science deter¬ mined whether I should adorn the small predatory dinosaurs with scales or with feathers. Alas, there was no simple answer at the time, because there was no fossil evidence for either possibility. What I found disturbing was that many paleontologists were totally biased against illustrating dinosaurs with feathers, even though the available data was neutral on the subject. This bias only boosted my interest in researching bird origins. <...>