[metmom]

How many whole dinosaur skeletons would they have had to find?

I can’t see the primitives having the time to sit around and reassemble a carefully dug up skeleton just to see what it looked like. That’s the kind of thing one could do if every waking moment wasn’t about surviving.

[mysterio]

How many whole dinosaur skeletons would they have had to find?

Probably they just found skulls and part of the spine.

I can’t see the primitives having the time to sit around and reassemble a carefully dug up skeleton just to see what it looked like.

Why would they have to do that? They just saw big toothy skulls sticking out of the ground and assumed whatever it was just died. And that there were probably more of them tooling around out there in the woods. They extrapolated the rest by imagination.

[Deklane]

Fossils don’t necessarily have to be carefully dug up. They can be fairly obvious when eroding out of exposed rock. Depending on how complete the skeleton is, it can be quite evident that the bones are from a very large animal that no longer exists. The Lakota Indians in the South Dakota Badlands found dinosaur fossils and were inspired to devise legends of river monsters. (Google Lakota, Badlands, fossils for a number of references.)