IT’S HARD TO IMAGINE that less than 200 years ago, not a single 5-year-old would have asked what your favorite dinosaur is. The word, meaning “terrible lizard” in Greek, wasn’t coined until 1842. Before then, people didn’t really know what those fossils were, though they’d been finding them for centuries. As late as the 1600s, one famous scientist thought a bone was the remains of a human giant. To be fair, that almost feels more plausible than the truth—that far back in time, on a very different earth than the one we know today, reptiles ruled. We’re now in the golden age of dinosaur science, with a new species being discovered once a week on average! So far, researchers have identified about 2,000 species, yet paleontologists are still baffled…
