Before paleontology was a science/discipline...

...how much did the world know about pre-historic life on earth at different points in human history? Does anybody or has anybody even studied such a thing? Did humanity find fossils curious in the time of Shakespeare or in the Dark Ages or in the Egyptian empire? Were there early discoveries of fossil skeletons and such and if so, was there any awareness of what they were looking at? Does anything like this appear in historic records?