Get latest articles and stories on World at LatestLY. Credit for discovering the first dinosaur bones usually goes to British gentlemen for their finds between the 17th and 19th centuries in England. Robert Plot, an English natural history scholar, was the first of these to describe a dinosaur bone, in his 1676 book The Natural History of Oxfordshire. World News | Africans Discovered Dinosaur Fossils Long Before the Term ‘palaeontology' Existed.