If you want to see a “full size” pliosaur fossil, there’s one on display at the Wyoming Dinosaur Center in Thermopolis.
For a relatively small museum in an out of the way place, they have a pretty impressive collection. They also offer fossil hunting tours in digs located in the hills nearby.
I imagine a medieval person encountering such a fossil, and I guess I can see why it might be cause to imagine dragons.
(Those last 2 words are the name of a band, I think.)
Have a look at Willy Ley’s popular science books, or Adrienne Mayor’s The First Fossil Hunters about exactly this scenario.
Oddly enough, most of the documented cases of people mistaking fossil remains for dragons and the like involve fossil mammals rather than dinosaurs. Nevertheless, the suggestion is strong that fossil early ceratopsians like Protoceratops and Psitticasaurus inspired Griffins, and that dinosaur skeletal remains inspired the Babylonian Sirrush.
When Whitby’s nuns exalting told,
Of thousand snakes, each one
Was changed into a coil of stone,
When Holy Hilda pray’d:
Themselves, without their holy ground,
Their stony folds had often found.
(Except we now realise that Ammonite fossils are the remains of ancient cephalopods)
You know, looking at that skeleton, and the jaws, I’m more and more convinced that the asteroid was a good thing.
Omg that is so freaking cool!!