Modern-day paleontologists and rockhounds alike know how to recognize dinosaur fossils because we have a couple hundred years of research to rely on. That wasn't the case when Oxford naturalist Robert Plot was presented with a fossilized bone unearthed at a quarry in 1677. No one knew what a dinosaur was then, so the bone was a mystery. Plot recognized it as a femur, but it was too big to be from a horse or an ox, so it must have come from an elephant. When Plot later got to examine an elephant skeleton, he knew that was wrong. So the fossil must have been from a human giant, like those described in the Bible.
Almost 100 years later, that fossil got a Latin name based on a drawing Plot had made of a portion of that by-then-lost fossil, Scrotum humanum. The drawing sure looks like a human scrotum, but real scientists never took that seriously. To this day, the public takes delight in the story of that name. The point about these misidentifications is that we have to put ourselves into the mindset of those early scientists who confronted fossils and had no concept of species that had gone extinct. They, like we, were building their theories upon what was already known, and that knowledge had gaps that weren't obvious at the time. It makes you consider what scientists in future generations will think about the knowledge base of the 21st century. Read about that first dinosaur fossil in an excerpt from a new book on the subject by Edward Dolnick at Literary Hub. -via Damn Interesting