Who was the first person to find a fossil?
People have been finding fossils for as long as they have been looking at the ground! Ancient Chinese found bones of dinosaurs eroding out of the ground and called them dragons. They thought that dragon bones would be good medicine, and so many dinosaurs were ground up into dust and swallowed! Travellers in the early part of this millennium crossing the Gobi desert, saw Protoceratops skulls eroding out of the cliffs, and created legends of Griffins, mythical beasts with the head of an eagle, the paws of a lion and wings. The first person to recognise the significance of fossils, as being bones and evidence of past life, was Georges Cuvier, at the end of the 18th Century, who described the bones of extinct elephants, compared them to living elephants, and recognised the fossils as being ancestors to living elephants.
