This is the memory palace. I'm Nate Demayle.

The bones had been there for something close to forever, of course.

People had been finding them in lake beds and tar pits,

protruding from white cliffs streaked with lime for as long as there had been people.

The bones have dinosaurs and sapertooth cats and sloths as tall as fung boots,

and just as our cake. Different cultures had different interpretations.

Finding in these bones proof of dragons and ogres and biblical giants,

and other mythical beasts that were no less believable or any more spectacular than what

these creatures actually turned out to be. But the bones stayed in the ground for the most part.

Every once in a while someone would make a fantastic discovery, usually finding an ancient

amped up version of some contemporary animal. It's a sloth, but it's big. It's an elephant, but it's

hairy. But in the 1820s, a number of British scientists pieced together some clues from pieces of

bone and teeth found in an English forest, and discovered a creature they called the iguanodon.

And after that people started digging an earnest, finding more bones and fossils,

identifying more species. Until they all these brand new animals that had been there under our

feet the whole time became known as dinosaurs, so named in 1842 by the naturalist Servicerdown.

The name meant terrible lizards or tyrannical lizards or fearfully great lizards,

depending on how you preferred to translate from the Greek. And there at the start of the Victorian

age dinosaurs became all the rage. Because a, dinosaurs are awesome. And b, here you were living your

Victorian life, going about your Victorian day, wearing tall hats, buttoning up petticoats,

picking pockets. And then suddenly you were living in a world in which dinosaurs once existed.

But for years people just had the bones, and they had scientists speculating about how those

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