The first dinosaur bones weren’t found by scientists. They were uncovered thousands of years ago by early men with no way of understanding what they were seeing.
Ancient men stumbled upon fossils just like we do today, and they had to do their best to figure out what in the world they were looking at. Some would see femurs the size of a fully grown man or great rib cages that stretched out as wide as a building.
There are a handful of records that give us a hint into how they made sense of these things—small glimpses into what it would have been like to stumble upon the remains of a dinosaur thousands of years ago.