George Washington Never Heard the Word “Dinosaur.” Neither Did the Other Founding Fathers.

Today, a roaring Tyrannosaurus rex is as familiar as any living animal. But the idea of dinosaurs is surprisingly young. George Washington died in 1799 without ever knowing that giant reptiles had once ruled the Earth. Science simply hadn’t discovered them yet.

George Washington passed away in 1799. The word “dinosaur” wasn’t coined until 1842. The Founding Fathers literally had no idea these giants once walked the Earth.

Bones Without a Context

People had been digging up enormous fossils for centuries. They just had no framework to explain them.

In 1677, English naturalist Robert Plot published an illustration of a huge thighbone found in Oxfordshire. It was later identified as belonging to Megalosaurus, one of the first dinosaurs ever described. Plot had no concept of prehistoric reptiles, so he reasoned it must have come from something familiar: a giant elephant, perhaps brought to Britain by the Romans, or a giant human.

How the Picture Came Together

It took decades after Washington’s death:

1824-1825: William Buckland described Megalosaurus and Gideon Mantell described Iguanodon, both recognized as enormous extinct reptiles.
1842: Anatomist Richard Owen coined the term Dinosauria, usually translated as “terrible lizard” (more precisely, “fearfully great lizard”), to group these animals together.

That was a full decade after Charles Carroll, the last surviving signer of the Declaration of Independence, died in 1832 at age 95. The word “dinosaur” didn’t exist in his lifetime.

Curious, Just Not About Dinosaurs

The Founders weren’t incurious about the deep past. Thomas Jefferson was an avid fossil collector, and in 1797 he described the claws of a giant ground sloth he called Megalonyx. He even hoped living ones might still roam the American interior. But the idea that whole ecosystems of reptiles had come and gone long before humans was still decades away.

Deep Time

Non-avian dinosaurs lived for roughly 165 million years, from about 230 to 66 million years ago. That span is so vast that T. rex, which lived about 66 million years ago, is closer in time to us than to Stegosaurus, which lived about 150 million years ago.

While Jefferson searched the wilderness for living giants, the real story was buried under his feet.

Source: https://historyfacts.com/famous-figures/fact/george-washington-didnt-know-that-dinosaurs-existed-2/