Iguanodon has a special place in history. It was one of the very first dinosaurs ever recognized by scientists, named in 1825 by an English doctor named Gideon Mantell. He found its teeth and thought they looked like the teeth of a giant modern iguana - hence the name.
For 30 years, no one had any idea what Iguanodon looked like. So in 1854, when life-sized statues were built for the public to see, the artists guessed. They turned Iguanodon into a giant four-footed reptile, like a rhino-sized iguana, and stuck its mystery thumb-spike right on the tip of its nose like a rhino horn.
It wasn’t until full skeletons turned up in a Belgian coal mine in 1878 that scientists realized: Iguanodon walked mostly on two legs, that spike belongs on its hand, and it could use its tongue to grab leaves. Almost everything we first guessed about dinosaurs turned out to be wrong.
