ਡਾਇਨਾਸੌਰ

Stegosaurus skeleton, Field Museum, Chicago.

ਡਾਈਨੋਸੌਰ Reptile ਹੁਦੇ ਸਨ। ਡਾਈਨੋਸੌਰ ੨੩ ਤੋ ੬ ਕਰੋੜ ਸਾਲ ਪੁਰਾਣੇ ਜਾਨਵਰ ਸਨ। ਡਾਈਨੋਸੌਰ ਦੀ ਖੋਜ ੧੮੬੨ ਇਸਵੀ ਵਿੱਚ ਕਿਤੀ ਗਈ ਸੀ, ਅਤੇ ਇਸ ਨਾਲ ਪੰਛੀ ਅਤੇ ਡਾਈਨੋਸੌਰ ਦਾ ਰਿਸ਼ਤਾ ਲਭਿਆ ਗਿਆ ਸੀ। ਉੱਨੀ ਵੀਂ ਸਦੀ ਤੋਂ ਡਾਈਨੋਸੌਰ ਪਿੰਜਰਾਂ ਨੂੰ ਮਾਨਤਾ ਪ੍ਰਾਪਤ ਹੋਈ। ਉਦੋ ਤੋਂ ਦੁਨਿਆਂ ਭਰ ਵਿੱਚ ਡਾਈਨੋਸੌਰ ਦੇ ਪਿੰਜਰ ਅਜਾਇਬ ਘਰਾਂ ਵਿੱਚ ਮੁੱਖ ਆਕਰਸ਼ਣ ਬਣ ਗਏ ਹਨ। ਡਾਈਨੋਸੌਰ ਨੂੰ ਬੱਚਿਆਂ ਵਿੱਚ ਬਹੁਤ ਕਾਮਜਾਬੀ ਮਿਲੀ, ਅਤੇ ਉਨ੍ਹਾਂ ਉੱਤੇ ਬਹੁਤ ਹੀ ਕਹਾਣੀਆਂ ਲਿਖਿਆਂ ਅਤੇ ਫਿ਼ਲਮਾਂ ਬਣਾਇਆਂ ਗਈਆਂ ਹਨ।

History of discovery

ਡਾਈਨੋਸੌਰ fossils have been known for millennia, although their true nature was not recognized. The Chinese, whose modern word for ਡਾਈਨੋਸੌਰ is konglong (恐龍, or "terrible dragon"), considered them to be dragon bones and documented them as such. For example, Hua Yang Guo Zhi, a book written by Zhang Qu during the Western Jin Dynasty, reported the discovery of dragon bones at Wucheng in Sichuan Province. Villagers in central China have been digging up ਡਾਈਨੋਸੌਰ bones for decades, thinking they were from dragons, to make traditional medicine. In Europe, ਡਾਈਨੋਸੌਰ fossils were generally believed to be the remains of giants and other creatures killed by the Great Flood.

William Buckland.

Megalosaurus was the first ਡਾਈਨੋਸੌਰ to be formally described, in 1677, when part of a bone was recovered from a limestone quarry at Cornwell near Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire, England. This bone fragment was identified correctly as the lower extremity of the femur of an animal larger than anything living in modern times. The second ਡਾਈਨੋਸੌਰ genus to be identified, Iguanodon, was discovered in 1822 by Mary Ann Mantell - the wife of English geologist Gideon Mantell. Gideon Mantell recognized similarities between his fossils and the bones of modern iguanas. Two years later, the Rev William Buckland, a professor of geology at Oxford University, unearthed more fossilized bones of Megalosaurus and became the first person to describe ਡਾਈਨੋਸੌਰ in a scientific journal.

The study of these "great fossil lizards" soon became of great interest to European and American scientists, and in 1842 the English paleontologist Richard Owen coined the term "ਡਾਈਨੋਸੌਰ". He recognized that the remains that had been found so far, Iguanodon, Megalosaurus and Hylaeosaurus, shared a number of distinctive features, and so decided to present them as a distinct taxonomic group. With the backing of Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, the husband of Queen Victoria, Owen established the Natural History Museum in South Kensington, London, to display the national collection of ਡਾਈਨੋਸੌਰ fossils and other biological and geological exhibits.

In 1858, the first known American ਡਾਈਨੋਸੌਰ was discovered, in marl pits in the small town of Haddonfield, New Jersey (although fossils had been found before, their nature had not been correctly discerned). The creature was named Hadrosaurus foulkii. It was an extremely important find; Hadrosaurus was the one of the first nearly complete ਡਾਈਨੋਸੌਰ skeletons found and it was clearly a bipedal creature. (The first was in 1834, in Maidstone, Kent, England) This was a revolutionary discovery as, until that point, most scientists had believed ਡਾਈਨੋਸੌਰ walked on four feet, like other lizards. Foulke's discoveries sparked a wave of ਡਾਈਨੋਸੌਰ mania in the United States.

Othniel Charles Marsh, 19th century photograph.

Edward Drinker Cope, 19th century photograph.

ਡਾਈਨੋਸੌਰ mania was exemplified by the fierce rivalry between Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh, both of whom raced to be the first to find new ਡਾਈਨੋਸੌਰ in what came to be known as the Bone Wars. The feud probably originated when Marsh publicly pointed out that Cope's reconstruction of an Elasmosaurus skeleton was flawed; Cope had inadvertently placed the plesiosaur's head at what should have been the animal's tail end. The fight between the two scientists lasted for over 30 years, ending in 1897 when Cope died after spending his entire fortune on the ਡਾਈਨੋਸੌਰ hunt. Marsh 'won' the contest primarily because he was better funded through a relationship with the US Geological Survey. Unfortunately, many valuable ਡਾਈਨੋਸੌਰ specimens were damaged or destroyed due to the pair's rough methods; for example, their diggers often used dynamite to unearth bones (a method modern paleontologists would find appalling). Despite their unrefined methods, the contributions of Cope and Marsh to paleontology were vast; Marsh unearthed 86 new species of ਡਾਈਨੋਸੌਰ and Cope discovered 56, for a total of 142 new species. Cope's collection is now at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, while Marsh's is on display at the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale University.

Since 1897, the search for ਡਾਈਨੋਸੌਰ fossils has extended to every continent, including Antarctica. The first Antarctic ਡਾਈਨੋਸੌਰ to be discovered, the ankylosaurid Antarctopelta oliveroi, was found on Ross Island in 1986, although it was 1994 before an Antarctic species, the theropod Cryolophosaurus ellioti, was formally named and described in a scientific journal.

Current ਡਾਈਨੋਸੌਰ "hot spots" include southern South America (especially Argentina) and China. China in particular has produced many exceptional feathered ਡਾਈਨੋਸੌਰ specimens due to the unique geology of its ਡਾਈਨੋਸੌਰ beds, as well as an ancient arid climate particularly conducive to fossilization.

ਹਵਾਲਾ

ਵਿਕਿਸਪੀਸ਼ੀਜ਼ ਦੇ ਉਪਰ Dinosauria ਦੇ ਸਬੰਧਤ ਜਾਣਕਾਰੀ ਹੈ।