Bill Bryson - Science Red in Tooth and Claw

Bill Bryson - Science Red in Tooth and Claw

In this chapter I learnt about how scientists analysed and discovered fossilized bones from creatures dated years and years ago.

It all started in 1787 when someone in New Jersey found a thigh bone, which was thought to be from a duckbilled dinosaur, sticking out of a stream bank at Woodbury Creek. At the time they didn't know about dinosaurs so they sent to to an anatomist  call Dr Caspar Wistar. He failed to recognize what the bone was from and missed the chance to be the discoverer of dinosaurs.

In Philadelphia, naturalists started to assemble the bones of a huge elephant-like creature known as 'the great American ingonitum' but was later identified as a mammoth. In their keeness to show the incognitum's ferocity, the naturalists appear to have gotten carried away. They overestimated its size by a scale factor of six and gave it terrifying claws, which actually came from a Megalonyx or a giant ground sloth.

In 1812 at Lyme Regis on the Dorset coast, a young child named Mary Anning found a starnge fossilized sea monster, 17 feet long and is now known as the ichthyosaurus, embedded in the steep, dangerous cliffs along the English Channel. That was the start of a remarkable career as Anning would spend the next thirty-five years gathering fossils, which she sold to visitors. She is commonly belived to be the source of the famous tongue-twister 'She sells sea-shells on the sea-shore'.

In conclusion, scientists spent years trying to discover bones from dinosaurs and other creatures that were fossilized into stone all over America and England.