Iguanodon

Hi, I'm Zeb from New York, and I'm five years old, and this is my dino fact.

Did you know that Iguanodon, when it was first discovered, they didn't know where the th- ... spike when found in their fossil.

First they thought that it was a nose spike, but then when other complete fossils, they fo- when they found other complete fossils, they realized that it was a thumb spike, mm, to op- maybe to open up fruits and bend down branches so it could eat.

And also maybe to, to fend other predators that was hungry.

There's a photo of iguanas and these are just Galapagos marine iguanas and they're labelled NASA photo to say these are the dinosaurs we found on Mars apparently.

But that makes sense because, I mean, it makes sense in a kind of totally deluded way because, of course, one of the first dinosaurs was Iguanodon and it was named and assumed to be essentially just a giant iguana.

Yeah, I mean, it's funny, isn't it? Like, we'll see throughout this, but a lot of these space dinosaur concepts adhere a lot more rigidly to the idea of dinosaurs that's more in line with that kind of like old-timey lizard creature.

They really abide by, you know, 1930s style dinosaurs rather than what we know, even when it's something from 92.

Yeah, maybe they've been there the whole time.

Yeah.

So 167 years, like the domino meme, it starts with like Iguanodon having the nose spike at the Crystal Palace and it ends with Iguanas on Mars.

Makes total sense to me.

But they hadn't really hit kids books.

So when I was a kid, the Iguanodon, used to wander around with his thumbs up all over the place because of the way the reconstruct looks literally nothing like that if you look at the modern interpretation of what the bones that they use for the iguana don't bleed and i love that because he was like hey and uh like fonzie and happy days he was thumbs up to everything I always loved the Stegosaurus because it was just a great dinosaur.

I always loved, I used to draw dinosaurs quite a lot when I was a kid.

I was a kid that drew everything, though.

There's one other famous thing about these dinosaurs that people sometimes know, and that is that they are wrong.

So, Iguanodon has got a big spike on his nose in the model in the park.

That spike didn't exist, turned out to be a thumb that they put in the wrong place when they learn more about Iguanodons.

Hyliosaurus's face was so wrong they knew it was wrong when they built it, and it was so wrong that they deliberately had it facing away from the viewing platform.

so you can't actually see its face at all.

Now, I can tell you which was the first one that was categorized and studied and was written, there was written information about it, and that's, uh, Megalosaurus from over in Europe.

Megalosaurus, followed closely behind by Iguanodon.

But people have been looking at fossils for a very long time, and so you could say they discovered them long before Megalosaurus was discovered and described.

Like in Asia, all the stories and the legend of dragons, I believe that what the early people in Asia were looking at were either sauropod skeletons.

Because they've got a bunch of things like Polacanthus, not Polacanthus, the other one.

Iguanodon.

There's Iguanodon.

There's also the Ankylosaur.

It doesn't matter.

That would be great too.

If we really want to go back, we can go back to when they first found Iguanodon and thought the horn was on its nose.

Yeah, that's right.

Do you like a Victorian era? That would be so cool.