Iguanodon Dinosaur of the Day

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Iguanodon: Dinosaur of the Day • I Know Dino: The big dinosaur podcast. News, interviews, and discussions about dinosaurs. Are you a dinosaur enthusiast? Learn more at / iknowdino . • You can also visit http://www.IknowDino.com for more information including a link to dinosaur sites near you. • Iguanodon (http://iknowdino.com/know-dino-podcas...) • Name means “iguana tooth” • Ornithopod that lived in the early Cretaceous, in what is now Belgium and maybe other parts of Europe • Other dinosaurs in the area include predators Aristosuchus, Eotyrannos, Baryonyx, and Neovenator, and other herbivores like Hypsilophodon, Mantellisaurus, the armored herbivore Polacanthus, and Pelorosaurus, a sauropod • Named in 1825 by Gideon Mantell, an English geologist • Second dinosaur named after Megalosaurus (discussed in episode 47); one of the three dinosaurs to define Dinosauria • The other genera used to define Dinosauria was Hylaeosaurus • There was tension between Mantell and Richard Owen (a scientist and man who named Dinosauria who was also a creationist and opposed the “transmutationism” idea of evolution. When he described Dinosauria, he said they were advanced and mammal-like, with characteristics that God gave them, and could not have transmuted from reptiles to mammal-like animals • Transmutation was the theory before Darwin’s theory of evolution • Mantell and Owen had a rivalry, and some historians think Owen took a lot of credit for Mantell’s work • The story of how Iguanodon was discovered was that Mary Ann, Gideon Mantell’s wife, found the teeth in 1822 in Sussex, England, while her husband was visiting a patient. But Mantell didn’t take his wife with him when visiting patients, and in 1851 he admitted he had found the teeth • Mantell first found large fossils at a quarry in Whitemans Green in 1820, but he thought they belonged to a giant crocodile. In his notebooks he mentioned in 1821 that he found herbivorous teeth and thought it might belong to a large reptile. He presented the teeth to the Royal Society of London in 1822 but they thought it was just fish teeth or rhinoceros teeth (happened again in 1823 when Charles Lyell showed the teeth to Georges Cuvier, a French naturalist). • William Buckland was one of the members of the Geological Society of London to say the teeth belonged to a fish or rhino • Cuvier was known for correctly identifying Pterodactylus as a flying reptile • He thought the teeth were of a rhino, but the next day had his doubts, but Lyell only told Mantell about Cuvier’s first thoughts of the teeth, so Mantell put them to the side for a while • Then Buckland described Megalosaurus in 1824 and was invitied to see Mantell’s collection. He thought it was a dinosaur, though not an herbivore. So Mantell sent some teeth to Cuvier, who said in June 1824 that they were reptilian, possibly of a giant herbivore’s (admitting to his mistake in 1823). • Cuvier wrote a public retraction that he now thought the teeth were reptilian, not mammalian • Mantell’s discovery was now widely accepted • In September of 1824 Mantell went to the Royal College of Surgeons but couldn’t find any similar teeth. Then Samuel Stutchbury, an assistant curator, saw that they looked like a larger version of iguana teeth he had recently worked on • Because of this, Mantell named the animal Iguanodon (he was going to call it Iguana-saurus, but his friend William Daniel Conybeare said that name was more applicable to an iguana, so a better name would be Iguanoides (meaning Iguana-like) or Iguanodon • Conybeare said Iguanasaurus might cause confusion between the dinosaur and iguanas • Mantell wrote a letter about Iguanodon to the Portsmouth Philosophical Society in December 1824, and the Hampshire Telegraph published about it, but misspelled the name (Iguanadon instead of Iguanodon) • Mantell published his findings formally in February 1825 (presented the paper to the Royal Society of London) • Mantell didn’t give it a species name, but in 1829 Friedrich Holl named it Iguanodon anglicum, which later became anglicus • To learn more about dinosaurs and I Know Dino, connect with us on the following sites: • Facebook: / iknowdino • Twitter: / iknowdino • Tumblr: / iknowdino • Google+: https://plus.google.com/u/0/100785970... • Pinterest: / dinosauria • LinkedIn: / i-know-dino • Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/review/list... • iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/i... • Sound Cloud: / iknowdino • Stitcher: http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/i-kno... • For more I Know Dino videos, subscribe to our YouTube channel at / @iknowdino

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