The first scientific account about a dinosaur fossil was not published until 1677 in Europe. Then, Englishman Robert Plot described the lower end of a thighbone that formed the knee of Megalosaurus, a carnivorous dinosaur common in Jurassic rocks there, which walked on its two hind legs. At the time, however, Plot did not recognize his find as the bone of a long-dead reptile.
By the 1820s, fossils of Megalosaurus and Iguanodon, an Early Cretaceous herbivorous dinosaur, were discovered by geologists and doctors in England and recognized to belong to giant extinct reptiles. Then, a couple of decades later, in 1841, the famous English anatomist Sir Richard Owen first coined the name Dinosauria, meaning "terrible lizard," to refer to this group of what he considered to be enormous, extinct, lizard-like reptiles.