Some of the first dinosaurs were being found around the same time, like the meat-eating Megalosaurus and the beaked herbivore Iguanodon. These were big animals, no doubt, but nowhere near the size of the creatures that left the gigantic sauropod bones. So scientists didn’t make the connection with dinosaurs. Instead, they considered the sauropod bones to belong to the one type of thing they knew could get so huge: whales. It was a few decades before that mistake was corrected.
