In 1787 Meriwether Lewis send a leg bone to Caspar Wistar. Wistar was a renowned anatomist and an authority on fossils. In a paper published in The American Scientist, he describes this bone as a thighbone, to large to belong to any living indigenous species. Wistar didn’t speculate much on the origin of the bone or the species to which it could have belonged, but just described it as being rather immens. Wistar missed the opportunity to speculate, 70 years before others, about the existence of Dinosaurs. The paper attracted very little attention, and the bone moved from storage to storage and eventually got lost. The first described bone of a dinosaur was also the first one to get lost.
