MARGINALIA
American Dinosaurs: Who and What Was First
Who gets credit for the first dinosaur in North America depends on one's definition of a description and a fossil
Keith Thomson
In the year 2006 paleontologists will celebrate the 150th
anniversary of the first description of a dinosaur fossil from North
America. In March 1856 Joseph Leidy of Philadelphia wrote a brief
paper describing and naming four kinds of 75-million-year-old
reptilian teeth that had been discovered the previous year in the
Cretaceous beds of the Judith River region of Montana. Without any
of the media hoopla that accompanies many dinosaur discoveries
today, he showed that two of the new reptiles were unquestionably
dinosaurs, as judged from comparison with discoveries made in
England 30 years before. These were the first American dinosaurs.
(Leidy thought that the other two came from
"lacertilians"—lizards—but they eventually
turned out to be dinosaurs too.) Or perhaps they weren't. Who gets
credit for the first North American dinosaur is a matter that
depends on what constitutes a description, what counts as a fossil
and whether its collector or describer knew what he had, and when.
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