THE DISCOVERY OF DINOSAURS HISTORY

The great dates of the dinosaurs’ discovery

 600 before J.C. : Asian merchants pass on the Greek myths of the Griffin (lion body and eagle head) founded on the Protoceratops leftovers.

 300 before J.C. : The Chinese wisemen bring in the discovery of dragon bones.

 1667 : Robert Plot does a drawing of a Megalosaurus femur/thighbone (we think !)

 1824 : William Buckland is the first to describe a dinosaur thanks to the fossils bones of a giant reptile, which has been unearthed in 1815 in a limestone quarry at Stonefield, near Oxford. He called it Megalosaurus (huge lizard) and he includes it was a big lizard carnivore.

 1825 : Gideon Mantel discovers, by walking with his wife in the south United Kingdom, some fossilized teeth from an unfamiliar animal. Mantell called those teeth “Iguanadon” (iguana’s teeth), a huge herbivorous lizard.

 1856 : First descriptions of dinosaurs fossils in USA.

 1867 : The savant Henry Huxley suggests that birds are the dinosaurs descendants.

 1877/1895 : A Rivalry between Marsh and Cope lead to the discovery of numerous species such as Diplodocus, Allosaurus, Carmarasaurus.

 1969 : John Olstrom, from Yale University, publish the description of a Deinonychus and highlight that some dinosaurs were dynamics and complex animals.

 Since 1970 : More and more clues confirm that dinosaurs are ancestors of birds, thanks to anatomical studies showing the swiftness of those animals.

The matter of the Mas d’Azil comes from it geological soil.
Indeed the Plantaurel range match with numerous places with superior Maastrichtien stratum (period of the last dinosaurs).

There has been noted around fifty sites, more or less interesting, on the Plantaurel set, whose/that seven are today homologous and two others are in study. L’Ariège has enabled the discovery of new species and a diversity very interesting : eggshells, turtles, crocodiles, flying and marine reptiles, Sauropodes (Titanosaurs), raptor, Hadrosaurs.

Method for research of dinosaurs bones remains.

It is important to know that you can discover dinosaurs only in the rock to date from the Mesozoic era (trias, Jurassic, cretaceous). After a preliminary study of the favourable geological zone of dinosaurs on a map, palaeontologist does a geology race, which enable to localize precisely some sites. Researchers have sometimes to be lucky by searching to detect a little piece of bone sticking up out of a cliff or a hill.

Moreover, we can find some fossils in some sedimentary rocks such as clay, limestone or sandstone because, for example, the bones have suffered of big pressures or very important heat, like volcanic rocks, can’t contain fossils.