Dr. Mantell believed that the teeth and bones were the remains of a heretofore undiscovered creature. He showed them to several scientists, and while none of them could accurately identify the fossils, they steadfastly refused to believe that they were from some mysterious, unknown creature of the past. Frustrated, Dr. Mantell sent his finds to the French fossil expert, Baron Cuvier, who (incorrectly, as it turned out) identified the teeth as those of a rhinoceros, and the bones as those of an extinct hippopotamus. Later, Dr. Mantell showed the bones to a friend familiar with the iguana, a lizard living in Mexico and South America. While the fossilized teeth were much larger, his friend declared that they looked just like the teeth of the iguana. Convinced that he had discovered the remains of a giant plant-eating, reptile-like animal, Dr. Mantell named it Iguanodon (“iguana-tooth”). Meanwhile, huge bones and teeth were unearthed in Oxfordshire, and were concluded to have come from Megalosaurus, a lizard-like animal. By 1842, enough of these kinds of fossils had been discovered to convince the leading British anatomist, Sir Richard Owen, that a whole tribe of huge, lizard-like reptiles had lived in the past. He named them “dinosaurs” (from the Greek words deinos and sauros—“terribly great lizards”).

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