Mount Saint Peter
Around 1765 the skull of a "Mosasaurus" was discovered here in a limestone quarry, one of the first recognised reptile fossils, which was later acquired by the Teylers Museum in Haarlem. A more famous "Mosasaurus" fossil was found between 1770 and 1774 but was confiscated by the French in 1794 and is now in the Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle in Paris. Later dinosaur remains were discovered here as well, belonging to "Betasuchus" and "Orthomerus", as well as turtles and fossils of smaller creatures of the sea.
Massospondylus
The first fossils of "Massospondylus" were described by paleontologist Sir Richard Owen in 1854. Originally, Owen did not recognize these finds as those of a dinosaur; instead he attributed them to "large, extinct, carnivorous reptiles" that were related to today's lizards, chameleons and iguanas. This material, a collection of 56 bones, was found in 1853 by the government surveyor Joseph Millard Orpen in the Upper Elliot Formation at Harrismith, South Africa and was donated to the Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons in London. Among the remains were vertebrae from the neck, back, and tail; a shoulder blade; a humerus; a partial pelvis; a femur; a tibia; and bones of the hands and feet. All these bones were found disarticulated, making it difficult to determine if all material belongs to a single species or not. However, Owen was able to distinguish three different types of caudal vertebrae, which he attributed to three different genera: "Pachyspondylus", "Leptospondylus" and "Massospondylus". "Massospondylus" was separated from the other two genera on the basis of its much longer caudal vertebrae, which also led to the scientific name that has been derived from the Greek terms "masson"/μάσσων 'longer' and "sphondylos"/σφόνδυλος 'vertebra'. However, later it was shown that the putative caudal vertebrae of "Massospondylus" were actually cervical vertebrae and that all the material probably belongs only to a single species. On May 10, 1941, the Hunterian Museum was demolished by a German bomb, destroying all the fossils; only casts remain.