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When you step into the main hall at the Natural History Museum in London, it feels more like you're in a cathedral.

Vaulted ceilings, light streaming through tall windows, all that jazz.

And when you walk through that hall, under the blue whale skeleton suspended from the ceiling

and past the full dinosaur skeleton,

you approach a staircase.

It's one of those grand staircases, like the one in the Titanic, with a landing for someone

very important to stand on very prominently.

And that's exactly where you'll find Charles Darwin,

or a gleaming white statue of him, sitting all pensive on a throne with his hands folded in his

lap, overseeing the hall. But there was one person who would have really, really hated that Darwin statue, the founder of

the Natural History Museum. His name was Sir Richard Owen, and he invented the word dinosaur.

From Science Friday, this is science diction. I'm Johanna Mayer.

We're talking about the word dinosaur.

When it came to dinosaurs, for millennia, people had seen these mysterious bones, but they had no idea what they were.

There's even evidence that griffins, those magical creatures with the lion's body and wings were inspired by dinosaur fossils.

And it just so happens that England was a fossil goldmine. People came up with random names for this or that creature as they stumbled upon them, but nobody really put the pieces together

that all of these fossils were connected, part of the same family under a common name.

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