One of my favorite things is to look at old dinosaur art from the 19th Century, like these from &ldq

One of my favorite things is to look at old dinosaur art from the 19th Century, like these from “Earth Before the Deluge” from 1879.

Nowadays, despite the fact there are thousands of species of dinosaur, there are only six or seven “superstar” species used in every movie. Velociraptor is the latest addition to the list, since Jurassic Park and the Raptor Red books (you will not find a velociraptor in any movie prior to 1993), but if you asked someone from the 19th Century what the top dinosaurs were, the ones that drew crowds and were most associated with the concept, they’d probably say Iguanadon, Megalosaurus, Mosasaurus, Hyleosaurus, Icthyosaurus, and, as the 19th century started to end, Diplodocus (only the last one is all that well known to casual dinosaur fans). That’s because those dinosaurs were the earliest used to describe the concept.