Henlo,
Dinosaur Bone anon back here again. :V
I've always been te kind of person to respect the our academic ancestors in that they knew what they were doing :V That for the most part they were very smart and had a lot of things figured out :V They just lacked the technology to achieve feats we have today.
That being said.

The dinosaur bone history rabbit hole goes very deep Recently I discovered that the first credited "dinosaur bone" belonged to a Robert Plot. Strangely, before anyone said anything about "dinosaur" bones, Robert Plot found a bone that he attributed as a "giant thigh bone of relating to a giant human". Hmmmmm. Things that make you go hmmm.... The wikipedia entry for Robert Plot says that he : "believed that most fossils were not remains of living organisms but rather crystallisations of mineral salts with a coincidental zoological form." So this means that there were "dinosaur" bones found before this. Not one of those dinosaur bones revealed a giant reptile skull? Not one? Not one was a T-rex bone? not one was a brachiosaur? Lol.