Madrid 2 (European press)
In 1841, Richard Owen addressed the annual meeting of the British Society in Plymouth, England, where he presented some new fossils of terrestrial reptiles. He thought they were huge lizards. These included Iguanodon, Megalosaurus, and Hylaosaurus. He appears to have used his new word, dinosaur (“terrible lizard”), during that lecture, as it appears in the subsequent print report.
Science historian Hugh Torrence (1992) found that only when Owens did further study after the conference did he determine that they had a unique fusion of the sacral vertebrae. Only then did he put them in a new group, the dinosaurs. He revised his draft, so the word dinosaur appeared in the report printed in 1842.
Owen published the first major public report on the large group of terrestrial reptiles of the Mesozoic, now given the familiar name dinosaurs. Owen pointed out three distinct genera of dinosaurs: the carnivorous Megalosaurus, the herbivorous Iguanodon, and the armored Hylaeosaurus.
Owen was also the first to identify some early Mesozoic reptiles that resembled both amphibians and mammals, which he called Anomodontia. Most were obtained in South America, beginning in 1845 with (Dicynodon). In the end, it was enough to fill the catalog of South African reptile fossils, published by the British Museum in 1876.
