Читать книгу Too Big to Walk - Brian J. Ford - Страница 9

Philosophers took a long time to accept that the world had once been a different place. The next step up our ladder of understanding was the dawning realization that huge monsters had once lived on our Earth – creatures whose remains we could find, yet whose nature we could not yet discern. It was the insight of a young French naturalist that introduced the revolutionary idea that there had once been gigantic life forms that had long since ceased to exist. This great step was the brainchild of Jean Léopold Nicolas Frédéric Cuvier. Cuvier – known ever since as Georges – became the greatest naturalist of his age in France, and arguably in Europe. He was born in 1769 in the ancient town of Montbéliard, nestling close to the border with Switzerland, which at the time was ruled by Germany. His father, Jean Georges Cuvier, served in the Swiss Guards, and his mother, Anne Clémence Chatel, was devoted to him and spent much time teaching him. By the time he went to school he showed a fearsome eidetic memory and could recite in detail the chronology of kings and queens, princes and emperors. An enduring fascination for unravelling the past drove his lifetime of study. As a boy, working with his mother, the young Cuvier pored over the antiquated works on natural history by the great French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, and also those by Conrad von Geßner, the influential Swiss zoologist. As a result, by the age of 10 Cuvier was fully conversant with zoology and the classification of all the main animal types.1

Throughout his twenties, Cuvier became increasingly interested in fossils. In 1796 – aged just 27 – he was elected a member of the Academy of Sciences in Paris and presented his first paper on the comparisons between Asiatic and African elephants, and the fossilized remains of mammoths. He listed the differences between African and Asiatic elephants and clearly showed that they were distinct species. Cuvier carefully concluded that the fossils must represent creatures that were extinct. Some of the fossils he studied were of the animal still known as the ‘Ohio Animal’ – the monstrous bones were first excavated in the U.S. in 1739 and were always thought to be the remains of elephants. Cuvier demonstrated that they were anatomically distinct, and he subsequently proposed the name ‘mastodon’. Later that year he spoke of a huge skeleton that had been excavated in Paraguay. He compared its skull with the appearance of present-day sloths, and concluded that this was another kind of gigantic ground-dwelling sloth. He decided to name it Megatherium. These were two crucial papers – first, they demonstrated the value of comparative anatomy, and they also established the view that there were huge forms of life which no longer existed. The young Cuvier ensured that the idea of extinct giants was formally established, and his two lectures set the science of palæontology onto a firm footing.

In 1784 an Italian philosopher, Cosimo Alessandro Collini, reported on a curious fossil that had been dug out of the smooth, creamy Solnhofen limestone in Bavaria. The fossil was part of the cabinet of curiosities in the palace of Charles Theodore, Elector of Bavaria at Mannheim, and it had perfectly preserved wings. Collini concluded that these were the remains of a sea creature with huge fins, though a French/German naturalist named Johann Herman insisted that the fossil represented some kind of bat. Collini heard of Cuvier’s growing interest in fossils, and wrote to him about it, and by 1801 Cuvier had concluded that the fossil represented a flying reptile. He gave it a name we recognize today: ptero-dactyle. Other investigators continued to debate its true nature; it was sometimes claimed to be a bird, a catfish, or a lizard. Not until the 1860s was the nature of a pterodactyl – as a winged reptile – generally agreed.2

It was also Cuvier who recognized the true nature of Johann Scheuchzer’s fossilized skeleton; in 1812 he correctly identified it as a fossil salamander. Until that time the petrified remains had been accepted by every scholar as evidence of a drowned man from the biblical flood, and it fell to the French philosopher’s genius to reveal the truth. The specimen had been purchased by the Teylers Museum in Haarlem, the Netherlands, in 1802 and it remains there on display to this day. It was formally named Salamandra scheuchzeri by a German botanist, Friedrich Holl, in 1831.

Cuvier’s work was widely disseminated and in 1799 it came to the attention of a physics professor in the Netherlands, Dutch scientist Adriaan Gilles Camper. He had been contacted by both Hoffmann and Drouin about the ‘monster of Maastricht’ to resolve whether it truly was a fish, a crocodile or a sperm whale. The fossil had remained a mystery and in England it had become a topic of fascination for James Parkinson, a young and enthusiastic physician with a passion for geology. Parkinson didn’t enjoy trudging over rocks and was no great enthusiast for fieldwork. He obtained most of his specimens from the London dealers and eventually amassed a collection of over 3,000. Parkinson became Britain’s leading palæontologist.

Meanwhile, an enthusiastic student of rocky strata was a young resident of southern England who spent much of his time collecting in the field. This bright young man was Gideon Algernon Mantell, born in Lewes, Sussex, on February 3, 1790, an enthusiastic youngster destined to study medicine and eventually to become a leading obstetrician. Although medicine was to be his profession, his enduring passion was the study of fossils. During Mantell’s childhood, words like geology, scientist and palæontology were largely unknown. There was, however, nothing new about the term fossil. It derives from the Latin fossilis, the past participle of the verb fodere, ‘to dig’, and once meant anything excavated from the ground. It acquired its modern-day meaning in the 1730s, some 70 years after Robert Hooke was writing about fossils in his book Micrographia.

The young Mantell was keen to meet the great James Parkinson, but the enthusiasm was not reciprocated for several years. This was frustrating for a budding enthusiast, for there were few scientific publications that one could study. Parkinson was persuaded that it was time to publish a formal account, and he compiled three majestic folio volumes entitled Organic Remains of a Former World, each extensively illustrated. They were published in London in 1804, 1808 and 1811 – the last being the same year in which Gideon Mantell graduated from St Bart’s Hospital in London. In later life, the elderly Parkinson was more inclined to meet Mantell, and eventually they became firm friends. Parkinson wrote:

I am totally ignorant of the science [of fossils] which teaches us their natural history … I find myself so totally ignorant of their origin, as not even to know in what class of nature’s works to place them.3

This was an honest reflection of the degree of understanding at the time, and his three volumes represent an impressive collation of what was then known. There are separate sections dealing with fossilized shells and familiar marine creatures, of course; and he went on to describe fossils of what he concluded were whales, crocodiles, elephants, mastodons, and even several rhinoceroses. Petrus Camper, the Dutch physicist, had by this time speculated that perhaps a fossil he had found was the skull of a giant monitor lizard, and in 1808 Cuvier agreed. Cuvier published an engraving of what he called ‘the large fossil animal of the quarries of Maastricht’ and he decided to name it Mosasaurus, after the River Meuse, near where it was found.4

Parkinson later reproduced the illustration as Plate XIX Fig. 1 in his own book. The original specimen taken back to Paris by Napoleon’s troops is still on display at the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle in the Jardin des Plantes, though the Netherlands authorities have recently been demanding its return.

Nobody dwelled on the significance of these early finds; the fossilized remains of seashells continued to be taken by everybody as proof of the biblical story of the flood. Similarly, when three-toed dinosaur footprints were found preserved in rocky strata, they were conventionally regarded as the marks left by the raven that Noah had sent out looking for land. The significance of these fossil remains lay in verifying the Bible. Without an understanding of prehistory, those biblical interpretations were the obvious first point of reference. Quarrymen and miners used to keep fossils, knowing that they might be sold to collectors. In 1676 a curious stone relic was discovered in the Stonesfield quarry in Oxfordshire, a place that was eventually to become a leading source of fossils for the Victorian palæontologists. It was a strange bilobed object and was purchased by Sir Thomas Pennyston, who later agreed to present it to Robert Plot at Oxford. At that time, Plot was still busily setting up the Ashmolean Museum and he published a report on the find in his Natural History of Oxfordshire in 1677.

I have one dug out of a quarry in the Parish of Cornwell, and given me by the ingenious Sir Thomas Pennyston, that has exactly the Figure of the lowermost part of the Thigh-Bone of a Man or at least of some other Animal, with capita femoris inferiora, between which are the anterior … and the large posterior Sinus: and a little above the Sinus, where it seems to have been broken off, shewing the marrow within of a shining Spar-like Substance of its true Colour and Figure, in the hollow of the Bone. In Compass near the capita femoris, just two foot, and at the top above the sinus measures about 15 inches: in weight, though representing so short a part of the Thigh-Bone, almost 20 pounds.5

His suggestion that this came from an animal proved to be prescient, and for a time he interpreted the bone as coming from a Roman war elephant, though his later interpretation was that it came from a gigantic human.6 Philosophers at the time accepted that 10-foot (3-metre) giants had lived in the past, for they were mentioned in the Bible.7

What Plot was describing was actually the end of a fossilized long-bone. His published engraving is the first we have of a dinosaur bone, even though nobody at the time realized its significance. Plot himself was an enthusiastic naturalist and collector who met many of the luminaries of his day and carefully cultivated their acquaintance. Plot saw himself as Britain’s answer to Pliny the Elder; just as Pliny had written his Natural History, so Plot resolved to publish a Natural History of his own that would commemorate his lifetime’s work.8

Plot’s description of the fossil was meticulous, though he did not assign a scientific name to the specimen. His illustration was re-published by Richard Brookes in 1772. Brookes was a physician and naturalist who wrote a great many books on British wildlife, and his desire to categorize species correctly obliged him to find a suitable designation. Considering its appearance, and disregarding Plot’s attempt at a detailed description, it seemed to Brookes that he knew what it was. There was only one name that unambiguously summed up its appearance: in the fourth volume of his New and Accurate System of Natural History he boldly named it ‘Scrotum humanum’. It certainly looked like one.9

This fossil was found in the Stonesfield quarry near Oxford in 1676 and given to Robert Plot. He identified it as ‘Scrotum humanum’ but is it actually part of a Megalosaurus. His published engraving was the first illustration of a dinosaur bone.

Observation and the art of seeing were becoming a philosophical preoccupation of the learned classes at this time; it was even the subject of literature for children. A six-volume book entitled Eyes or no Eyes; or, the Art of Seeing, written by John Aiken and his married sister Anna Barbauld, was published in 1780. It told the tale of two brothers who walked together in the countryside; one finding it a tedious trip, with nothing of interest, while the other was endlessly engaged in the plant species that they encountered, the myriad insects and meadow creatures he could see, and the geology of the landscape – even finding traces of a prehistoric encampment. It was not what you could see that mattered, but what you perceived. The book was so popular it was frequently republished and remained constantly in print for well over a century.10 So successful was the book that the celebrated W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan later wrote an opera with the same title.

When Gideon Mantell was growing up in Sussex, the rocky strata around his home were rich in fossils of oyster-like shellfish along with ammonites and belemnites, both of which we now know had swum by jet propulsion like cuttlefish. There was little surprise at the sight of those fossils among the village folk who discovered them. Clearly, they were further evidence substantiating the biblical descriptions of the flood. The shellfish were believed to have been deposited during that inundation, while the coiled shells of ammonites were regarded as serpents that had been turned to stone and the pointed belemnite fossils were taken to be thunderbolts. Collecting these fossilized remains was a popular hobby among youngsters, and young Gideon’s enthusiasms were triggered by the discovery of an exquisite ammonite fossil when he was about 12 years old. Even though palæontology was a word yet to be coined, the collecting of fossils now had a term: oryctology. It is now forgotten and absent from most dictionaries (it has no page in Wikipedia), having originated from the Greek oryktos meaning ‘formed’. And so, by the time Gideon was grown, he was already a seasoned oryctologist.11

It was Mantell’s desire to become a physician that took him to St Bart’s Hospital, where his collecting in the field was replaced with the purchasing of fossils from London dealers including Joseph Stutchbury. Many of the doctors at Bart’s were fascinated by fossils, including the celebrated anatomist John Hunter, and many of those doctors simply purchased curiosities from dealers. In 1790 Hunter wrote a revolutionary account of fossils. Wisely, he proposed that the layers of marine fossils he observed had not resulted from the biblical accounts of a flood, and he concluded: ‘Many retain some of their form for many thousand years …’12

By this time, the way in which layers of rock were laid down in succession had become a fashionable subject for study in Germany. First to write authoritatively on the subject was a mineralogist born in 1714, Johann Gottlob Lehmann. He studied at Wittenberg and was subsequently invited by the Russian Academy of Sciences to move to St. Petersburg and expand his work. Rocky strata seemed to him amenable to serious scientific study, and he realized that they must have been laid down in strict order. In one mining area he identified more than 20 strata, which he called Flötzgebirge, and he soon realized that studying the sequence could perhaps allow prospectors to locate mineral-bearing strata. He concluded that this could be a key to the discovery of vast mineral riches.13

The idea was taken up by Abraham Werner, a young mineralogist who had studied at Freiburg, Saxony, and Leipzig. What a curious man was this – sensibly enough, he taught students that rocks were laid down in an orderly fashion, the study of which could help to ascertain where minerals would lie; but, although he never travelled, he confidently concluded that the sequences he observed in Saxony were representative of those everywhere else on Earth, and he decided that volcanoes resulted from the combustion of coal measures deep below the ground. He had a captivating and charming manner. His students hung on every word. He was only 36 when he published a definitive analysis on a classification of mountain ranges that quickly became essential reading for all budding geologists.14

One person who bought the book when it appeared was Alexander von Humboldt, a brilliant explorer and naturalist; he was the younger brother of the Prussian linguist and philosopher Wilhelm von Humboldt, and studied mineralogy and geology under Abraham Werner at the School of Mines in Freiburg, Saxony. Alexander von Humboldt bequeathed to us the most familiar geological period of all – the Jurassic. This was the name he gave to an important set of limestone strata that Werner had omitted from his book. This characteristic pale limestone was observed by Humboldt in the Jura mountains, so in 1795 he called it Jurakalk. From this, the term ‘Jurassic’ was soon to emerge. Now we know that this period extended from 201.3 to 145 million years ago, and was an era populated by gigantic sauropod dinosaurs. Alexander von Humboldt became widely admired and internationally famous. He was elected a foreign member of the Royal Society in England and the Royal Academy of Sciences in Sweden, while in the U.S. he was showered with honours, being elected a foreign member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a member of the New York Historical Society, the American Antiquarian Society and the American Ethnological Society. Thomas Jefferson described him as the most important scientist he had ever encountered. Although Humboldt has named for us one of the best-known eras in the whole of palæontology, he did little research in that field and never studied fossil animals. But he did write about prehistoric crocodile tracks in samples of Buntsandstein rock that he discovered in 1834. He thought the footprints had been made by a mammal similar to an opossum, though he hinted that they might alternatively have been made by a primate. The tracks became known casually as the footprints of a ‘hand-beast’, but at the time the discovery gave rise to no new scientific insights.15

The first scientific description of fossil reptiles – which may have included remains of dinosaurs – was published in 1776 by a French zoologist and cleric, Abbé Jacques-François Dicquemare. His primary interest was in sea anemones, but he was fascinated by fossils and he diagnosed his fragmentary fossils as being the petrified remains of fishes and whales. Lurking in his discussion is a crucial concept – he seemed to hint that they might represent creatures that had since become extinct. This was the first suggestion that the remains of prehistoric creatures might possibly be found in the rocky strata.16

Meanwhile a French enthusiast, Charles Bacheley (incorrectly identified by Cuvier and every standard scholarly source since as ‘Abbé Bachelet’), had developed a passion for fossilized creatures that he found near the pretty coastal town of Honfleur, which nestles close to the mouth of the Seine. I have often retraced his steps. In 1773, he collected fossils that he thought were the remains of a whale. In reality, they comprised cranial and postcranial specimens from two crocodile-like teleosaurs, plus some postcranial vertebræ of a meat-eating theropod dinosaur. Bacheley became acquainted with Jean-Étienne Guettard and sent some of his specimens along to Guettard for him to identify, before publishing an account in 1778.17

Recent investigations have confirmed that these fossils were collected at Les Vaches Noires, a zone of coastal rocky strata that would prove to be among the most fossil-rich in Normandy. Three years later, at Le Havre on the opposite bank of the river, Dicquemare reported the find of similar remains, which he interpreted as fossil porpoises and dolphins. Bacheley’s collection passed to C. Guersent, who was a geology professor at the museum in Rouen. In 1799 Jacques Claude Beugnot, a local dignitary, ordered that the collections of fossils from Bacheley and Dicquemare should be transported to the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris. The existence of the discoveries was finally published by Cuvier in 1800.18

Vertebræ of Streptospondylus were discovered in 1778 by a French collector, Charles Bacheley. These were the first known European dinosaur fossils. In 1842 the British palæontologist Richard Owen dubbed the dinosaur Streptospondylus cuvieri.

Not until 1808 did Cuvier formally describe the fossils in detail. He had interpreted them as belonging to members of the crocodile family and gave them the name Streptospondylus. In fact, as we have seen, the vertebræ came from a medium-sized theropod dinosaur. Even though nobody realized it at the time, these were the first fossils from a meat-eating dinosaur ever to be recorded by science.19

In America, the ‘Ohio Animal’ had continued to attract interest, and in 1796 Thomas Jefferson (who became the president of the United States just five years later) sent a small expedition to look for extinct mastodons and mammoths near the Ohio River in Kentucky. Like most well-educated statesmen of his time, Jefferson liked to keep abreast of discoveries in natural history and science. Indeed, when the White House was first built, it was furnished with a ‘Mastodon Room’ to house fossil collections. In 1797, Jefferson gave a presentation at the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, describing a fossilized giant sloth that now bears his name: Megalonyx jeffersonii. When the presentation was printed as an academic paper in the Society’s journal, it became one of the first American publications in the developing field of palæontology.20 More recent American presidents are perhaps less likely to publish academic papers in scholarly journals.

Dinosaur footprints were now being discovered by new arrivals in the United States. The first we know about were unearthed in 1802 by a farm boy named Pliny Moody of South Hadley, Massachusetts. Moody dug up a slab of red sandstone while ploughing. It showed some small, sharp, clear, three-toed footprints. This fine specimen was fixed above the farmhouse door, where a local physician confidently identified them as being the tracks of Noah’s raven. The story of the biblical flood was still the conventional explanation at the time, because there was no understanding of fossil footprints left by dinosaurs, so although it seems fanciful to us, this was a popular diagnosis at the time. We are quick to ridicule such early conventions, though a glance at today’s religious television channels reminds us that present-day beliefs can be as superstitious and fanciful as anything we have seen in the past.

The Napoleonic Wars had been raging in Europe and they finally ended in 1815, whereupon Georges Cuvier seized the opportunity to visit England. One of his first ports of call was to meet William Buckland in Oxford. Buckland was born on March 12, 1784, in Axminster, Devon, and spent much of his time as a child walking across the countryside with his father, the Rector of Templeton and Trusham. His father used to show him how to collect fossilized shells, including ammonites, from the strata of Jurassic Lias that were exposed in the quarries. The young Buckland went to school in Tiverton, and eventually entered Corpus Christi College at Oxford University, to study for the ministry. He regularly attended lectures on anatomy given by Christopher Pegge, a physician at the Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford, and he was particularly intrigued by part of a fossilized jawbone that Pegge had purchased for 10s 6d (now about £40 or $55) in October 1797. Buckland also went to the presentations given by John Kidd, Reader in Chemistry at Oxford, on subjects ranging from inorganic chemistry to mineralogy, and discovered that Kidd had himself collected several fragments of huge bones from the Stonesfield Quarry near Witney, some 10 miles (16 km) away. The plot was thickening.

Buckland meanwhile continued searching for fossil shells in his spare time. These he initially took as evidence of the biblical story of the flood, but as the years went by he turned towards more scientific reasoning and abandoned the literal truth of the Old Testament. After graduating, he was made a Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, in 1809, and he was formally ordained as a church minister. In 1813 Buckland was given the post of Reader in Mineralogy, following John Kidd, and his dynamic and popular lectures began to include a growing emphasis on palæontology. By now he was becoming an experienced collector, and in 1816 he travelled widely in Europe, including Austria, France, Germany, Italy, Poland and Switzerland. He visited Cuvier on several occasions.

Buckland became something of an eccentric. He always wore an academic gown instead of overalls for his fieldwork and claimed to have devoured his way through most of the animal kingdom, serving mice, crocodiles and lions to his guests (and he claimed that the two foods he disliked most were moles and houseflies). On his travels, he was said to have been shown the preserved heart of King Louis XIV nestling in a silver casket and remarked: ‘I have eaten many strange things, but have never eaten the heart of a king before,’ and so he picked it up and bit into it before anybody could stop him.

Buckland’s first major prehistoric discovery was not of a reptile, but a human – the Red Lady of Paviland, a human skeleton found in South Wales. He decided to explore the largely inaccessible Paviland cave on January 18, 1823, only to find this well-preserved skeleton, which he initially took to be the corpse of a local prostitute. He later concluded that the body had been placed there by early residents in pre-Roman times, though more recent tests have shown that it dates back 33,000 years – indeed, it is now accepted as the most ancient human skeleton ever found in Britain. Buckland married an enthusiastic fossil collector and accomplished artist, Mary Morland, in 1825, and thereafter Mary devoted herself to illustrating her husband’s palæontological publications with flair and skill.

By the time of Cuvier’s visit, Buckland was studying fossil collections, and among the specimens he showed to his French visitor were the Scrotum humanum and Pegge’s curious specimen of a fossilized jawbone. Cuvier concluded that these were both fragments from gigantic reptiles. William Conybeare, a palæontologist colleague of Buckland’s, referred to these specimens as the remains of a ‘huge lizard’ for the first time in 1821, and the physician and fossil hunter James Parkinson soon announced his intention to call the creature Megalosaurus from the Greek μέγας (megas, large). Parkinson estimated that this had been a huge land animal measuring 40 feet long and 8 feet tall (12 x 2.5 metres). Parkinson is little known today as a palæontologist, though we all know his name in a different context – he is the physician who correctly identified the degenerative disease known, in his time, as a ‘shaking palsy’ and which we now call Parkinsonism. Most palæontologists at the time were physicians, and many made discoveries that resonate beyond the world of the fossil collector.

Buckland now faced urgent demands from Cuvier for details to include in his own book, and meanwhile Buckland continued to investigate the fossil remains, while his wife Mary began preparing the detailed drawings of the remains for publication that were to be the basis of the published lithographic plates. Buckland had met Mary while travelling by horse-drawn coach in the West Country. An account records:

Both were travelling in Dorsetshire and each were reading a new and weighty tome by the French naturalist Georges Cuvier. They got into conversation, the drift of which was so peculiar that Dr. Buckland exclaimed, ‘You must be Miss Morland, to whom I am about to deliver a letter of introduction.’ He was right, and she soon became Mrs Buckland. She is an admirable fossil geologist, and makes midels in leather of some of the rare discoveries.21

They worked together diligently in every spare moment they could find. There was now growing interest in the fossils being found at Lyme Regis on the Dorset coast of southern England. Most people believed these rocky remains to be the fossils of familiar fauna (crocodiles or dolphins). Collectors including Henry de la Beche and William Conybeare carefully examined a range of specimens, and published a joint account in 1821 concluding that they might represent something very different – a new kind of reptile. They mentioned the work of a host of amateur collectors, acknowledging ‘Col. Birch, Mr. Bright, Dr. Dyer, Messrs. Miller, Johnson, Braikenridge, Cumberland, and Page of Bristol,’ and they now concluded that this new type of reptile formed a bridge between ichthyosaurs and crocodiles, and so they coined a new term for these creatures: plesiosaurs.22

Interest in the fossil reptiles started to spread, and in 1822 James Parkinson published a book on his investigations entitled Outlines of Oryctology, which, although primarily concerned with seashells and other familiar fossils, also reported the latest investigations of the huge reptile fossils that were now beginning to appear. In this book, Megalosaurus was included as ‘an animal, approaching the monitor [lizard] in its mode of dentition, &c., and not yet described,’ while Mosasaurus was defined as ‘The saurus of the Meuse, the Maestricht animal of Cuvier.’ Parkinson reported that Cuvier and others placed this reptile ‘between the Monitors and the Iguanas. But, as is observed by Cuvier, how enormous is its size compared with all known Monitors and Iguanas. None of these has a head larger than five inches; and that of this fossil animal approaches to four feet.’ Suddenly there was a glimpse of the future – the notion of gigantic prehistoric reptiles was began to emerge.23

The Bucklands had by this time assembled a range of fossils carved out from the Stonesfield strata, including a length of lower jaw with a single tooth, a dorsal and an anterior caudal vertebra, five fused sacral vertebræ, two ribs and several sections of the pelvis. Clearly, these did not all come from the same animal, and Buckland’s interpretation of some of the bones was incorrect (he thought the ischium was a clavicle). Mary provided perfectly precise pictures of the specimens for the lithographer, and on February 20, 1824, at a meeting of the Geological Society of London, Buckland formally announced the discovery of a new monster reptile bearing the name bestowed upon it by James Parkinson: Megalosaurus.24

William Buckland asked his wife Mary to prepare these exquisitely detailed drawings of the jawbone found in the Stonesfield quarry, and in February 1824 he announced the name James Parkinson had suggested for this dinosaur: Megalosaurus.

With James Parkinson’s pioneering report, and now with William Buckland’s formal paper, the world’s first dinosaur was formally revealed to the world. It had taken almost 150 years for the true nature of the Scrotum humanum specimen to be recognized. No, it was not an ancient gentleman’s family jewels, but a monster’s elbow. What an extraordinary revelation!25

Lyme Regis, a coastal village in the English county of Dorset, was emerging as a centre for the study of fossils. The most prominent of the collectors was Richard Anning, a cabinetmaker who had settled in Blandford Forum and married a local girl, Mary Moore (popularly known as Molly), on August 8, 1793. They moved to Lyme and built a house for themselves by the bridge over the River Lym. Storms sometimes struck that shore, roaring in from the Atlantic and devastating the beach. The Annings’ home was flooded more than once; on one stormy night it was said that they had to climb out of an upstairs window to escape the rising tide. On Christmas night, 1839, the entire family almost lost their lives. It was after midnight, with everyone in bed and asleep, when there was a mighty roar and the ground suddenly shuddered as a huge slice of the cliff slid into the sea. Witnesses next day said there was a vast chasm where the land had split open for more than half a mile (about 1 km), and a cliff-top field belonging to a farmer slid down 50 feet (about 15 metres) towards the sea. The Bucklands were staying nearby at that time, and Mary used her considerable artistic talents to capture the scene for posterity. Next morning, Boxing Day, the beach and the shattered cliff top were thronged by visitors, eager to see the catastrophic collapse. The landslip caused a huge reef to appear in the sea, towering 40 feet (about 12 metres) tall and enclosing a lagoon at least 25 feet (8 metres) in depth. Within weeks, all this had washed away, and the beach had returned to normal.

Richard and Molly Anning had 10 children. Their first was Mary, who was born in 1794, but tragically died in a fire. The Bath Chronicle newspaper recorded the incident: ‘A child, four years of age of Mr. R. Anning, a cabinetmaker of Lyme, was left by the mother for about five minutes in a room where there were some shavings … The girl’s clothes caught fire and she was so dreadfully burnt as to cause her death.’ It seems she was trying to rekindle the fire with the slivers of wood.26

In December 1839, Mary Buckland drew the great landslip near Lyme Regis. It was engraved on zinc by George Scharf and printed as a hand-tinted lithograph by Charles Joseph Hullmandel, who studied chemistry under Michael Faraday. (Reproduced by permission of the Geological Society of London)

The distraught parents named their next baby girl Mary in memory of their lost child – and this little girl was destined to become the greatest of all the pioneer fossil hunters. Of the remaining children, only one other, a son named Joseph, survived to adulthood. Infant mortality through this period was around 50 per cent, so the loss of so many infants would not have been regarded as particularly unusual. People at that time lived so close to tragedy. Death was simply a shade of daily life.27

The rocky strata near Lyme Regis are marked by numerous layers of Blue Lias, a rock rich in mudstone that was originally the bed of a shallow sea. This form of rock is widely spread across southern England and South Wales and was laid down in late Triassic and early Jurassic times between 195 and 200 million years ago; it is also known as Lower Lias. The muddy seabed was littered with ammonite shells, and the remains of sea creatures – fish and swimming reptiles – are also abundant. Both youngsters accompanied their parents scouring the rocky shelves exposed after a storm, and they quickly became adept at finding fossils. Then, in 1810, their father Richard Anning suddenly died, and the family was left in penury. Their only possible source of income was now fossil hunting, and the children went out with their mother each day, looking for fossils to sell as souvenirs to visitors. They sold, as they do today, for a present-day value of about £10 ($12). When he was 15, young Joseph discovered part of a remarkably well-preserved ichthyosaur in a rocky shelf and showed his sister where it lay. A year later it was more fully exposed, and Mary had the skill to extricate it from the shore. The skeleton was well preserved, though at the time they could find no skull. Those who saw it concluded that it was some sort of crocodile. Ever since John Walcott’s published descriptions in 1779, others had been finding similar specimens. The Blue Lias rock is visible along the coast of South Wales, and as a student I used to find fragments of ichthyosaur skeletons in the smooth strata that storms had exposed. At Welsh St. Donats in 1804, an enthusiast named Edward Donovan discovered an ichthyosaur specimen represented by its jaw, vertebræ, ribs and pectoral girdle. It would have measured 13 feet (4 metres) long and was adjudged to be a gigantic lizard. In the next year two more were found in the same strata on the opposite side of the Bristol Channel, one discovered at Weston by Jacob Wilkinson and the other by the Reverend Peter Hawker. This specimen soon became known as Hawker’s Crocodile. In 1810 an ichthyosaur jaw was dug out at Stratford-upon-Avon, but the locals simply put it with some bones from a fossilized plesiosaur to make up a specimen that was more marketable. The name ichthyosaur was becoming popular, derived from the Greek ιχθυς (ichthys, meaning fish) and σαυρος (sauros, lizard).

By 1811 the time was ripe for a major discovery: in Lyme Regis, along what is now called the Jurassic Coast of Dorset, the first complete ichthyosaur skull was found by Joseph Anning, the brother of Mary, and she soon found the thoracic skeleton of the same animal. Their mother Molly sold the whole piece to Squire Henry Henley for £23 (now about £1,300 or $1,600) and it was later bought by the British Museum for twice the price. It remains on display at the Natural History Museum and is now identified as a specimen of Temnodontosaurus platyodon. Both the young Mary and her mother were now adept fossil hunters, while Joseph went on to train as a furniture upholsterer. It was the sight of the young Mary Anning that visitors found so unusual. She did not just collect, but she studied the remains that she found, transcribing lengthy accounts from learned texts and meticulously copying the illustrations of fossils they contained.

By now, Buckland was regularly visiting Dorset to purchase fossils and collect his own specimens, and he became particularly intrigued by the ‘bezoar stones’ that Mary Anning had been discovering alongside her ichthyosaur skeletons. The bezoar was the name given to an indigestible mass found within human intestines; it was believed that a glass of poison containing a bezoar would be instantly rendered harmless. The word comes from the Persian pādzahr (پادزهر), meaning ‘antidote’. Anning discovered that, when those rounded, rough stones were broken open, they always contained the scales and bones of fish and smaller ichthyosaurs. In 1829, Buckland recognized that these stones were present everywhere that fossil reptiles were found, and he suddenly realized what they were. They were fossilized faeces. They really were masses from within the gut. Buckland decided to call them ‘coprolites’, the term we use to this day. He became devoted to the study of the fossils that Mary Anning had discovered, and his enthusiasms gave rise to an historic painting by Henry de la Beche entitled Duria Antiquior – a more Ancient Dorset, which portrayed some of the swimming reptiles Mary Anning had discovered, with some of Cuvier’s pterodactyls swooping across the heavens. At last it was becoming clear that there had been an age of strange reptiles that were frighteningly large and had bizarre lifestyles. The age of the dinosaur was steadily coming closer.

A prominent British geologist, Sir Henry Thomas de la Beche, born in London in 1796, had moved to Lyme Regis where he befriended Mary Anning. He investigated fossil reptiles and wrote extensively on surveying rocky strata. De la Beche was by this time known as one of the most prolific of geologists, and his published works range from the description of fossil marine reptiles to the study of British stratigraphy. He also wrote learned textbooks dealing with the application of geological survey methods. However, he became best known by the public for his talent as a cartoonist. In one of them he satirizes the likes of Buckland and Lyell. This cartoon appeared in 1830, the same year in which Lyell’s great, ground-breaking formal book on geology was published in London. In this mighty work Lyell discussed stratigraphy, dealt with the value to commerce of systematic prospecting, arguing that the forces that were acting in nature today were the same as those that had acted in the past, and asserted that they would be the same in the future (the theory that pretentiously became known as uniformitarianism). When Charles Darwin set off on his voyage aboard HMS Beagle in 1831, it was Lyell’s new book that accompanied him on his geological expeditions.28

In 1830 Henry de la Beche, the first director of the Geological Survey of Great Britain, painted this historic watercolour representation of prehistoric life based on Mary Anning’s discoveries. He entitled it: Duria Antiquior – A more Ancient Dorset.

The French fossils that Cuvier had dismissed as being from a crocodile had meanwhile yet to be properly identified. In June 1793, a zoologist named Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire had become one of the first 12 professors at the newly opened Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris. His principle concern was setting up a zoo, but the following year he had struck up a relationship with Cuvier and they published several joint papers on the classification of animals. Fossils were also discussed. In 1807 Saint-Hilaire was elected to the French Academy of Sciences and concentrated thereafter on the study of the anatomy of invertebrates, corresponding at length with his British friend Robert Edmund Grant. His assistant, a young undergraduate who was particularly interested in barnacles, was a medical school drop-out named Darwin – Charles Darwin. Saint-Hilaire was concerned that Cuvier had too hastily concluded that Streptospondylus was a crocodile, and so he examined the fossils again. He decided that they belonged to two species of extinct reptile, and named them Steneosaurus rostromajor and S. rostrominor. In England, Megalosaurus was already officially recognized as a genus, though it still had no species name. It was a German palæontologist, Ferdinand von Ritgen, who gave it the provisional name Megalosaurus in 1826. He called the species Megalosaurus conybeari, though this name was never formally adopted.29

In 1827 Gideon Mantell resolved to include this fossil animal in his geological survey of south-eastern England and felt it appropriate to name it in honour of Buckland. It has been known as Megalosaurus bucklandii ever since. This was a crucial step in the history of science: it was the first dinosaur name formally to enter the literature of science. Suddenly, dinosaurs were real.30

These new areas of investigation were now attracting increasing attention. The Geological Society of London was inaugurated on November 13, 1807, at the Freemasons Tavern in Great Queen Street, and Buckland was elected their president in 1824–1825 and again in 1840–1841. He had been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1818 and became a member of their Council from 1827 to 1849. Buckland’s interest in spreading the word led to his involvement in the newly formed British Association for the Advancement of Science, and in 1832 he was appointed their president and chaired the second conference. By now, Buckland was riding high.

The limestone and chalk quarries at Maastricht continued to provide specimens for collectors, and indeed the final 6 million years of the Cretaceous are known to this day as the Maastrichtian epoch. In spite of his studies of fossil mammals – including extinct species, like mammoths – Cuvier steadfastly refused to accept the concept of evolution. To him, species were immutable, and he substantiated this notion by comparing mummified cats and dogs from ancient Egypt and showing that these creatures were unaltered when compared with present-day specimens. Frozen carcasses of woolly mammoths had first been excavated by explorers in the 1690s, and the first scientifically documented example was discovered in the mouth of the River Lena, Siberia, by a Siberian hunter named Ossip Schumachov in 1799.31

Schumachov saw these carcasses as a viable source of tusks that he could sell on to ivory traders, but Johann Friedrich Adam, a Russian explorer who later changed his forename to Michael, went at once to inspect the newly discovered frozen carcass. He found that much had already been devoured by wolves. Even so, it provided the most complete mammoth skeleton ever found and was assembled at the Zoological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, where it was mounted alongside a skeleton of an Indian elephant.

This substantiated that animals could become extinct and that skeletons of preserved carcasses were similar to the fossilized remains that were excavated elsewhere. Cuvier documented his fossil skeletons, and in 1812 he published his research, serving to dignify the study of fossils. The Maastricht fossil was a lizard as big as a crocodile, and the pterodactyl he distinguished from birds or bats, insisting it was a flying reptile. These were exciting conclusions that were already causing consternation and interest among scientists and writers. It was now clear that there had been eras when strange and unfamiliar creatures roamed the Earth32 and in Bleak House, which Charles Dickens started writing in 1852, he said it would be ‘wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill.’

The resonances of these fossils in present-day thinking were alluded to by Reverend Charles Kingsley, when he published a serialized story in MacMillan’s Magazine each month from August 1862 through to March 1863.

French palæontologist Louis Figuier published his La terre avant le deluge (the world before the flood) in 1863 and it became immensely popular. His illustrator, Edouard Riou, portrayed an Iguanodon and a Megalosaurus fighting with each other.

Did not learned men, too, hold, till within the last twenty-five years, that a flying dragon was an impossible monster? And do we not now know that there are hundreds of them found fossil up and down the world? People call them Pterodactyles: but that is only because they are ashamed to call them flying dragons, after denying so long that flying dragons could exist.

The stories were popular, and were brought together into a single volume in 1863. As a classical moralistic tale for children it has remained in print ever since.33

What was becoming increasingly apparent was the curious consistency in the way rocks had been laid down. This new science began with Friedrich August von Alberti, born in 1795, when he attended a military academy in Stuttgart and took up geology as a hobby. Later he took up employment in the salt production plant at Rottweil, an exquisite medieval town that has still changed little since the 1500s. (This is the place after which Rottweiler dogs are named; they are believed to be the direct descendants of the military breed that Roman soldiers brought during the invasions by the Caesars.) In 1815 Alberti came to recognize the occurrence of three characteristic strata composed of sedimentary deposits. He regularly found three distinct layers: one of red sandstone, capped by chalk, and succeeded by black shales. They occur throughout Germany and were later found to extend across the whole of northwest Europe. In each he found the same characteristic types of fossils and, from the Latin trias (meaning trio), he coined the term Triassic.34 We can now date this geological period as extending from 252.17 to 201.3 million years ago, for this is when the first dinosaurs appeared. The Jurassic period starts where the Triassic leaves off, and that is when dinosaurs first reached their enormous size.

Shortly after Alberti had coined the term Triassic, Jean Baptiste Julien d’Omalius d’Halloy in Belgium recognized the Cretaceous. Born in 1783 in Liège (now in Belgium, but then in the Austrian Netherlands), d’Halloy was sent by his wealthy family to study literature and the classics in Paris. He wanted none of it – geology became his consuming passion. He attended many lectures given by the distinguished naturalists and geologists and he learned everything he could from Georges Cuvier. He loved studying the rocky structure of France, and being of independent means he could travel as widely as he wished. In 1808 he published a learned paper entitled ‘Essai sur la géologie du Nord de la France’ in the Journal des Mines, an extraordinarily wide-ranging subject for someone working independently. It was in this paper that he recognized the distinct nature of coal-bearing strata, which he named Terrain Bituminifère. The name did not gain common currency, but it was the first time that the coal measures were identified as providing a key to an earlier era of the Earth’s history. He also recognized the era of chalk formation and drew sections showing its extent; this he named the Terrain Crétacé, and it was soon recognized in English as the Cretaceous period. He is estimated to have travelled more than 15,000 miles (24,000 km) across France, and he published an immense range of textbooks on geology, all written with clarity and precision, and including some of the first illustrations of the sequence of geological strata.35

Meanwhile, in England, William Coneybeare and William Phillips – both keen amateur geologists – had also concluded that the era of coal-bearing strata must have been confined to one period of time, because of the similar fossil plants that they all contained. Their conclusion substantiated d’Halloy’s designation of his Terrain Bituminifère. This had been an era of gigantic cycads, massive stands of horse-tail Equisetum plants, and huge conifers like today’s monkey-puzzle tree Araucaria. The two English friends realized that this had been an age of swampy forests and – because of the undeniable fact that this was the era that gave us coal – in 1822 they decided to call it the Carboniferous age, from the Latin carbō (coal) and ferō (bearing).36 Today we know this geological period extended from 358.9 to 298.9 million years ago.

Recognizing these great periods – the Jurassic and Triassic, Carboniferous and Cretaceous – had now given palæontologists a greater understanding of the ages through which the Earth had passed. Our present-day countryside reveals the tortured history of churning cliffs and the weathered remains of towering mountains that have resulted from the collisions between continents over millions of years. Now eroded and reduced in stature, the mountain ranges have become rolling hills and the cliffs are cut through like a layered cake so that the æons of prehistory can be seen in strata that stretch back in time. These reveal a timeline of the way that masses of land drifted across the globe, showing us how places like North America and Europe started in the southern Arctic wastes and slowly headed north, where they now extend up towards the northern latitudes of ice and snow. Once, today’s western nations sat at the equator, and the sandy deserts from that time are bequeathed to us as sandstone strata. Later, the land was covered with huge swampy stands of conifers and cycad trees as we drifted past the tropics, and we can see them still in the coal measures. The drifting still goes on. As new rocks are spewed up from a massive split in the Earth’s crust that runs down the middle of the Atlantic, the mid-Atlantic ridge, continental masses on either side are still being forced apart. America and Europe are moving away from each other at the same speed as your nails grow. Clip a couple of millimetres from your toenail and reflect on the fact that the flying distance between New York and London has increased by precisely the same amount.

Some of the rocky strata tell a powerful story of a prehistoric world dominated by massive monsters and strange landscapes. At Kimmeridge Bay in Dorset, for example, you find oil shales from which crude oil seeps just as it does in the world’s greatest petrochemical producing nations. Indeed, there is a nodding donkey oil pump at Kimmeridge, just like those in the American oilfields. Those shale beds formed during the late Jurassic, between 157.3 and 152.1 million years ago, and from them the most beautiful fossils sometimes emerge – bony skeletons of strange swimming plesiosaurs and forbidding dinosaurs. They have been collected as curiosities for centuries. The leading present-day collector is Steve Etches, a plumber who made his living repairing and installing bathroom and kitchen appliances around Kimmeridge. At least, that was in his day job; every moment of his spare time is spent hunting for fossils in the nearby rocky cliffs. He has a keen eye and can spot a fossil when most people see nothing but stone, and his home has been extended to become a private museum. Etches has collected more than 2,000 specimens over the past 35 years. Palæontologists the world over respect his achievements; indeed, in October 2016 the Museum of Jurassic Marine Life was opened a few yards from his home to display the highlights of his collection. It is an exquisite stone building, part of which is the village hall, while the rest is a museum and a laboratory which Etches can enter through a private door and where he can work at will, meeting with the public whenever he wants. This is a unique recognition of his impressive contributions to palæontology, and it was dignified by a formal inauguration ceremony early the next year which my wife and I were privileged to attend.

Steve Etches is the latest in a long line of enthusiasts and, as we have seen, the majority of practitioners of practical palæontology were never formally trained in the discipline. The Dorset shore where Kimmeridge lies has long been known as the ‘Jurassic Coast’ and it extends from Exmouth in East Devon to Studland Bay, near Poole in Dorset, a distance of 100 miles (160 km). It is near the middle of this coast that you will find Lyme Regis, known for its beaches and seaside views, and still a popular venue for fossil collectors. For centuries people have taken home fragments of rock with strange skeletal structures embedded in the surface or marked with the remains of peculiar shells. As interest in studying the natural world began to grow in the nineteenth century, families such as the Annings established businesses collecting fossils they could sell on to enthusiasts. The petrified specimens were originally advertised as thunderbolts or devil’s fingers (belemnites), snake-stones (ammonites) and verteberries (vertebræ). Demand had steadily increased since 1792, as tourism to the south coast of Britain increased when the French revolutionary wars made travel to the continent unsafe. The ancient city of Bath first became a magnet for Georgian tourists, but as visitors were sold the idea of immersion in water rich in minerals, bathing in the sea began to increase in popularity. Bathing machines – little sheds on wheels – sprang up along the coast, from which holidaymakers could demurely emerge and lower themselves into the edge of the ocean. The visitors sought souvenirs, and collecting fossils from the beach became an increasingly popular option, just as enthusiasts had done for centuries.

Among those early collectors was Lieutenant Colonel Thomas James Birch, who used to visit Lyme from his home in Lincolnshire. On a visit in 1820, he became aware that the Annings were in need of money, and he resolved publicly to auction all his fossil collection to help them. Having made no major discoveries for a year, the Annings were at the point of having to sell their furniture to pay the rent. The auction sale at Bullocks auction room in Wareham became a three-day event, with buyers coming from Vienna and Paris, and it raised £400 (over £23,000 or $27,000 today). Mary Anning had become renowned for her expertise and she was mentioned in the media. The Bristol Mirror in 1823 reported:

This persevering female has for years gone daily in search of fossil remains of importance at every tide, for many miles under the hanging cliffs at Lyme, whose fallen masses are her immediate object, as they alone contain these valuable relics of a former world, which must be snatched at the moment of their fall, at the continual risk of being crushed by the half suspended fragments they leave behind, or be left to be destroyed by the returning tide: – to her exertions we owe nearly all the fine specimens of Ichthyosauri of the great collections.

Similarly, the widow of the former Recorder of the City of London, Lady Harriet Silvester, wrote in her diary in 1824:

The extraordinary thing in this young woman is that she has made herself so thoroughly acquainted with the science that the moment she finds any bones she knows to what tribe they belong. She fixes the bones on a frame with cement and then makes drawings and has them engraved. It is certainly a wonderful instance of divine favour – that this poor, ignorant girl should be so blessed, for by reading and application she has arrived to that degree of knowledge as to be in the habit of writing and talking with professors and other clever men on the subject, and they all acknowledge that she understands more of the science than anyone else in this kingdom.

According to an account in The Dragon Seekers, a visiting collector once wrote:

I once gladly availed myself of a geological excursion with Mary Anning and was not a little surprised at her geological tact and acumen. A single glance at the edge of a fossil peeping from the Blue Lias, revealed to her the nature of the fossil and its name and character were instantly announced.37

Mary Anning was a remarkable young woman. It has been claimed that she was the inspiration for the popular tongue-twister: ‘She sells seashells by the seashore’, though Shelley Emmling, who investigated the legend, says this did not appear in print until Terry Sullivan incorporated it into a lyric he published in 1908, so that widely believed origin may be mistaken.38

Mary Anning was not just a fossil collector, or a dealer; she seriously studied what she found and used considerable ingenuity in comparing her fossils with living creatures. She noted that sepia is a brownish ink extracted from present-day cuttlefish, and so – finding fossils of similar animals bearing the traces of fossilized ink-sacs – she made her own ink from the fossils and demonstrated that it could be used in much the same way. When she found fossilized fish, she dissected fresh fish to seek anatomical comparisons. Her diligence and accuracy outshone the work of many professional palæontologists. Among the skeletons that she used to find were the remains of creatures that looked a little like dolphins. These were popularly known as sea dragons or crocodiles. One of her specimens was almost complete and it was inspected by the anatomist and surgeon, Everard Home, an unscrupulous investigator who was responsible for the loss of the Royal Society’s collection of microscopes made by the pioneering microbiologist Antony van Leeuwenhoek. Home also took away the anatomical studies written by John Hunter and began publishing them as his own. Home had worked with Edward Jenner on vaccination, and had bribed the burial party of the Irish giant Charles Byrne, who measured 7 feet 7 in (2.31 metres), having them put rocks into Byrne’s coffin while taking the corpse for Home to study. Even so, Home was cultivating a reputation for being a leading anatomist and he was more than willing to inspect Anning’s latest fossil. Initially, he declared it to be a crocodile; then he changed his mind and decided it was a fish. A year or so later he was saying it was a specimen of a creature that was halfway between fish and crocodiles, and then changed his mind again, deciding it was an amphibian lying between salamanders and lizards. Home was a capricious and devious character, and his personality resonated throughout his work.

Mary Anning was a student of her subject, and not just a fossil hunter. Many of her finds became popular souvenirs, and this Plesiosaurus skeleton, carefully excavated by Anning in 1823, was prepared as a lithograph by Thomas Webster.

By 1826, six years after the Anning family had been rescued from penury by Birch, Mary had saved just enough money to purchase a shop of her own. The family lived in the rooms above, and they named the premises ‘Anning’s Fossil Depot’. Business was soon flourishing, and the local press reported the opening, mentioning that in the middle of the display was a fine ichthyosaur skeleton. Geologists came to buy specimens from her, including collectors like Gideon Mantell, George William Featherstonhaugh (a curious, ancient English surname simply pronounced ‘fanshaw’) who described her as ‘a very clever funny Creature’, and even royalty: King Frederick Augustus II of Saxony visited her shop to buy a fossil ichthyosaur skeleton. In her later years Anning lost most of her personal money through a bad investment – sources are uncertain how this occurred – and William Buckland approached the British Association for the Advancement of Science and the Government to propose that she was given funds to continue her work. Mary Anning was granted a modest civil list pension by the royal household, in recognition of her contributions to the new science of palæontology. It brought her a trifling sum of just £25 each year, equivalent to £1,200 or some $1,600 in 2018. The Civil List Act 1837 stipulated that these pensions should be granted ‘to such persons only as have just claims on the royal beneficence or who by their personal services to the Crown, or by the performance of duties to the public, or by their useful discoveries in science and attainments in literature and the arts, have merited the gracious consideration of their sovereign and the gratitude of their country.’ Artistic civil list pensioners of the early nineteenth century were granted larger sums; the poets Lord Byron and William Wordsworth each received £300.

By the mid-1840s Mary Anning began to acquire a new reputation – her behaviour was changing, and the local people thought she was becoming an alcoholic. They were wrong: she had developed cancer of the breast. To keep the pain under control she drank increasing amounts of laudanum, a solution of opium, which caused her slurred speech and unsteadiness. When the news of her illness spread, the Geological Society of London launched a fund to help with her expenses, and the new Dorset County Museum appointed her an honorary member. In 1847 Anning died, and members of the Geological Society donated money for a stained-glass window in her memory, which was unveiled in St Michael’s parish church in Lyme Regis in 1850. An inscription nearby says:

This window is sacred to the memory of Mary Anning of this parish, who died 9 March AD 1847 and is erected by the vicar and some members of the Geological Society of London in commemoration of her usefulness in furthering the science of geology, as also of her benevolence of heart and integrity of life.

It was a rare distinction, and so richly deserved. Henry de la Beche, president of the Geological Society of London, delivered a eulogy that was published in the society’s Transactions. No other woman scientist had been similarly commemorated; indeed, the Society did not admit women members until 1904. The president began: ‘I cannot close this notice of our losses by death without adverting to that of one, who though not placed among even the easier classes of society, but one who had to earn her daily bread by her labour, yet contributed by her talents and untiring researches in no small degree to our knowledge of the great Enalio-Saurians, and other forms of organic life entombed in the vicinity of Lyme Regis.’ The eminent Charles Dickens dedicated an article to her in his literary magazine All the Year Round, ending with this tribute: ‘The carpenter’s daughter has won a name for herself, and has deserved to win it.’ More than any other single individual, it was she who launched the study of those curious prehistoric reptiles. Mary Anning was the first full-time professional palæontologist anywhere in the world.

To commemorate Mary Anning’s lifetime of devotion to studying and collecting fossils, in 1850 the Geological Society of London funded this stained-glass window for St. Michael’s Church, Lyme Regis, showing six religious acts of mercy.

Since the start of the nineteenth century, natural philosophy had become a common currency for the public. Amateur investigators were everywhere, and collecting curiosities was the perfect pastime for those with social aspirations. The enlightenment had percolated through society, and a new sense of rational thought was replacing traditional superstition. Yet in modern terms, scientific understanding was limited. The term ‘scientist’ did not exist; that term was not coined until 1834 when William Whewell, a philosopher polymath at Cambridge University, introduced it. Although the existence of now-extinct life forms was widely accepted, there was no understanding of the mechanisms for extinction. Humans were held to be a uniquely gifted form of life, though I have shown elsewhere that a single plant cell can detect stimuli similar to those we know through the classical five senses (sight, hearing, taste, smell and touch). Humans are optimized, but not unique.39

As knowledge expanded, the evidence unearthed by geologists was still interpreted in biblical terms. Gravel beds, for instance, simply proved the flood as described in the Old Testament. There was no formal association for oryctologists (as fossil enthusiasts were still known), and most of the fossils in collections were shells and isolated vertebræ. Most wealthy collectors purchased their specimens. Although they enjoyed wandering out and about in nature, picking up items of interest, most lacked the acute levels of perception to identify what was important. Naturalists know that a collector must ‘get their eye in’, and most fossil enthusiasts were armchair amateurs who found it easier just to buy what they could.

The science of geology was given a boost by the work of an uneducated genius, the son of an Oxfordshire blacksmith. This was William Smith, who became a surveyor and worked on the construction of canals and coal mines across the country. This is when he noticed how the same strata cropped up in disparate parts of Britain, and eventually he collected all his observations together to create the first geological map of the whole of Britain. Because he was of working-class origins he was widely dismissed by educated society; he spent time in a debtor’s prison and his work was extensively plagiarized. Eventually, however, his conclusions were published in 1815 as a vast and detailed map, 8 feet 6 inches (2.6 metres) long, the first detailed geological map of an entire country produced anywhere. It was an astonishing achievement. Smith’s conviction that rocks could be systematically studied arose from his awareness of the increasing interest in fossils. Whereas most people regarded them as objects of curiosity, Smith saw them as indicators of a hidden reality – the key to unravelling the strata on which Britain was built. Smith had clear sight and a methodical mind, and created lyrical literature. In 1796, he wrote this prescient prose:

Fossils have been long studied as great curiosities, collected with great pains, treasured with great care and at a great expense, and shown and admired with as much pleasure as a child’s hobby-horse is shown and admired by himself and his playfellows, because it is pretty; and this has been done by thousands who have never paid the least regard to that wonderful order and regularity with which nature has disposed of these singular productions, and assigned to each class its peculiar stratum.

The first geological map of Britain was published by William Smith, a self-educated surveyor, in 1815. It was over 8 feet (2.6 metres) long and was based on an outline map by John Cary. This was the first geological map to cover such a large area.

Smith fell into debt whan an agreement to provide stone for a customer could not be fulfilled. He raised £700 by selling his fossil collection to the British Museum but was confined in the debtor’s prison for the remaining £300. After his release in 1819 he worked as surveyor for Sir John Johnstone, who soon appointed him land steward to the family estate in Hackness near Scarborough. Johnstone was astonished at Smith’s knowledge, and encouraged him to design the Rotunda, a display of the geology of the Yorkshire coast with strata all shown in their correct order in curved cases. This remarkable building survives to the present day, and is the oldest geological museum anywhere in the world.

Gideon Mantell was also conversant with Smith’s map, and Mantell entered into deep discussions with others interested in rocks. For instance, he became friendly with a mining engineer named John Hawkins who was similarly interested in the strata that surrounded them. Other friends were George Bellas Greenough, who was working towards his own map of Britain’s rocky strata, and James Sowerby, who encouraged the young Mantell to publish a book that would extend and refine the results for Sussex published in William Smith’s pioneering map.

The year 1816 was a crucial watershed for Mantell. He married Mary Ann Woodhouse, a talented young artist, and took on a new post as surgeon at the Royal Artillery Hospital in nearby Ringmer, Sussex. He also published his first scholarly work that year, a book on the minerals in the area around Lewes. Next, he published a magazine article on the rocky strata of southeast Sussex. By this time he was starting to become prominent among the fossil hunters. When Colonel Thomas James Birch decided to auction his entire fossil collection for the benefit of Mary Anning, it was to Mantell that he wrote in March 1820, saying: ‘The sale is for the benefit of the poor woman and her son and daughter at Lyme, who have in truth found almost all the fine things which have been submitted to scientific investigation. I may never again possess what I am about to part with, yet in doing it I shall have the satisfaction of knowing that the money will be well applied.’

It was also in 1820 that Mantell heard of a new source of fossilized bones – the quarries in Tilgate Forest near Crawley, Surrey, some 10 miles (16 km) to the north of Cuckfield, from where most of his specimens had come. He travelled by one-horse chaise and stayed at the Talbot inn, which stands to this day, and from there he rode over to the quarries. Pieces of rock had been set out by the quarrymen for him to peruse and perhaps purchase, and he took a selection to study. We remember the men in palæontology much better than the womenfolk, but – just as Mary Anning regularly provided new and exciting specimens for them to study – Mantell later wrote that he owed his greatest leap forward to his wife, when she stumbled across a find that would finally launch the science that we now know as palæontology.

A devotee of Smith’s geological revelations was Gideon Mantell, an obstetrician and a brilliant amateur fossil hunter, who in 1822 first named a fossil dinosaur – Iguanodon. The fossils were originally thought to be those of a rhinoceros. In 1816 Mary Woodhouse married Gideon Mantell and became his co-worker. She was an accomplished artist and prepared many illustrations for publication. It has been said that Mary was the first to discover iguanodon teeth.

It was the summer of 1822, and Mary Ann was travelling with her husband en route to one of his patients at home. By the side of the road, she noticed a chunky fossil on a pile of discarded rubble and showed it to her husband. It was a huge tooth. This was the crucial discovery, and Gideon launched a full-scale investigation of the Tilgate Forest quarries, looking for more. Mantell did not record until 1827 that he had first been presented with that huge tooth by his wife, but – although they could not know this at the time – this was the tooth of an Iguanodon, a dinosaur that we now know measured 43 feet (13 metres) long and weighed some 4 tons. Other specimens were excavated by a quarryman, Mr. Isaac Leney from Cuckfield, and a selection of fossils was soon amassed. Clearly, they could only have come from a huge animal, and Mantell became increasingly excited.40

By the end of 1822 Gideon Mantell had at least half a dozen of these specimens, so he travelled to Paris the following year and showed them to Cuvier, who formally identified the specimens that the Mantells had collected as ‘the teeth of a gigantic crocodile, the teeth of a rhinoceros [and] bones of an herbivorous animal’ – in reality, the ‘crocodile’ was Megalosaurus and the ‘herbivorous animal’ would eventually prove to be Iguanodon. Mary Anning had recently found a virtually complete Plesiosaurus skeleton, and this was put on display along with the ‘Megalosaurus or great Fossil Lizard of Stonesfield’ that Buckland had brought along, and which Parkinson had included in his book. It had been excavated at Stonesfield. Cuvier was less dismissive of this fossil, describing it as ‘a monitor [lizard] forty feet long and the size of an elephant.’

Gideon and Mary Ann Mantell worked together on their major volume on the fossils of the South Downs, and it was published at about the same date as Parkinson’s book. It was an important book and it launched a more systematic study of fossils. The Mantells’ new book received a royal endorsement from King George IV at Carlton House Palace: ‘His Majesty is pleased to command that his Name should be placed at the head of the Subscription List for four copies.’41

Most of the fine lithographs that Mary Ann meticulously prepared were of shellfish, though towards the end of the plates there were tantalizing glimpses of the scales of the skin of fossil fish, and also a reptilian jawbone, complete with teeth.

The first engraving of the Hylæosaurus fossil that the Mantells unearthed in the Tilgate Forest quarry in 1832 was redrawn & lithographed by F. Pollard for The Geology of the South East of England, which was published in London a year later.

It was the large fossilized teeth that Mary Ann and Mr. Leney had collected that continued to fascinate Gideon Mantell. He compared these teeth with those of an iguana in the collection of the Hunterian Society and became increasingly convinced that his fossils were from a gigantic version of a monitor lizard. He consulted others on his findings, and in 1824 Cuvier wrote again to concede that: ‘I believe they belong to the order of reptiles.’ Mantell was thrilled by this confirmation from such a well-accepted authority, and thought that he might name the creature Iguanosaurus. A colleague, William Daniel Conybeare, by this time dean of Llandaff in Wales and an active amateur collector, suggested that the name be modified. ‘The name you propose,’ he wrote, ‘Iguano Saurus, will hardly do because it is equally applicable to the modern iguana … Iguanodon (having the teeth of an iguana) would be better.’ Mantell agreed, and presented a paper to the Royal Society on February 10, 1825, entitled ‘Notice on the Iguanodon, a newly discovered fossil reptile, from the sandstone of the Tilgate Forest in Sussex.’ His Iguanodon was officially acknowledged as a gigantic prehistoric reptile, and he had drawn a sketch showing the bones they had retrieved superimposed on how he envisaged the rest of the creature. He was impressed by a pointed spike that had been unearthed, and had wrongly assumed that it belonged on the snout (like the horn on a rhinoceros). He drew attention to the creature’s huge hindlegs, which he compared with those of an elephant, and concluded that their bulk was necessary to fit it for a life on land, writing that ‘the legs must have sustained the weight of the body in a manner more nearly resembling those in the pachydermal Mammalia.’

Gideon Mantell illustrated his 1825 paper for the Royal Society with this plate showing the Tilgate Forest iguanadon teeth in comparison with the jaw of an existing iguana. The genus of his fossil has since been reclassified as Therosaurus.

On October 26, 1825, Mantell sent a package of his specimens to Professor Adam Sedgwick at Cambridge University, including ‘casts of the best teeth of the Iguanodon in my collection’ – the originals he kept for himself. Mantell was writing up his notes for a new book on the geology of Sussex and this was to be a landmark publication. Mantell usually referred to it by part of its subtitle: ‘the fossils of the Tilgate Forest’. The specimens were illustrated by his wife Mary Ann in exquisite detail, and have a photographic clarity. For the first time Mantell described the fossil reptiles in detail – the contents page listed them: Crocodiles, Megalosaurus, Iguanodon, Plesiosaurus … these giants of prehistory were now becoming familiar to the academic world. Dinosaurs had at last arrived on the scientific scene.42

The book proved to be a landmark, and its level of detail is astonishing. Mantell discusses with precision the strata in which the fossils were found, dissecting each layer meticulously, so that the book stands today as a definitive statement. This is no amateurish essay into the unknown, but a serious scientific study. Yet the workload was almost unendurable: in his dedication of the book to Davies Gilbert, the Member of Parliament for Bodmin in Cornwall, Mantell wrote: ‘You are fully aware of the disadvantages under which I have laboured, and will generously make every allowance for the imperfections of a work, composed amidst engagements of the most harassing nature.’ Yet he pressed on, and in 1832 discovered the third dinosaur to be scientifically described. It was only half the size of the Iguanodon and Megalosaurus, measuring less than 30 feet (9 metres) long. It was found, again, in strata at Tilgate Forest, and Mantell wrote: ‘I venture to suggest the propriety of referring it to a new genus of saurian … and I propose to distinguish it by the name of Hylæosaurus.’ In spite of his continued success, life was not easy; in 1833 Mantell moved to the seaside resort town of Brighton but could not sustain his medical practice, and, when he became impoverished, his home was converted by the town council into a museum.

The following year, Mantell received some dramatic news: Iguanodon fossils had suddenly been found in a quarry near Maidstone, in Kent. He decided to investigate, but by the time he was able to reach the site, the strata had already been blown up with gunpowder (the standard accounts all say that the rocks were ‘dynamited’ but that explosive was not invented for another 30 years). Just one fossil-bearing slab survived the demands of the quarrymen, and the owner demanded £25 (in 2018 about £1,200 or some $1,600) before he would release it. Mantell didn’t have any spare money, but a group of his friends clubbed together to purchase the rock. It was transported to his home, where it took pride of place in his personal museum. With typical British wit, they called it the Mantell-piece. It proved impossible to separate out the individual bones, so Mantell and his wife worked on reconstructing the appearance of the remains from what they could see. The rock, formally named the Maidstone Slab, can be seen to this day hanging lost and lonely in the dinosaur gallery at the Natural History Museum in London. That is not the new dinosaur gallery; if you follow the signs, you will come to a kind of indoor theme park illustrated with inane cartoons and littered with shops selling plastic souvenirs, fridge magnets and children’s clothing. The new dinosaur display in that museum is like a gloomy version of Disney World, and most of the Victorian specimens are hanging on a high wall in a nearby gallery where few people notice them.

Mantell’s reconstructions of the dinosaur are largely based on this specimen, and he construed it as a quadruped with the proportions of a bear. Mantell made a sketch on paper which showed the bones they could recognize, placing the horn on the nose; and this remained the conventional interpretation for a century. Mantell began to give public lectures on his work at his home museum, and they proved so popular that in 1838 they were published in a single book devoted to the wonders of geology.43

Mantell so liked showing visitors around the collections that he frequently overlooked charging the standard entrance fee, and the museum soon became insolvent. By now he was becoming desperate, so he offered to sell his entire collection to the British Museum for £5,000 and readily accepted their counter-offer of £4,000 (worth some 50 times as much today: about £200,000 or $250,000). Mantell, who had become the founding father of dinosaurs after his wife’s prescient discovery of that first Iguanodon tooth, cut back on his fossil lectures and moved to Clapham Common in London to concentrate on practising as a physician. In 1839 Mary Ann left Gideon and emigrated to New Zealand, later sending him some new fossil discoveries, while their daughter Hannah died in 1840. The next year saw a dreadful accident: Mantell was caught in the reins of his horse-drawn carriage and severely damaged his back. From that day onwards his spine was painful and problematic. He moved to Pimlico in 1844 and, confined largely to his home, he continued to write books and papers on his discoveries, deadening the constant pain with laudanum, the solution of opium also taken by Mary Anning.

A horn had been found by Mary Mantell among the fossilized iguanodon remains, and when her husband sketched how the animal might have appeared in life, he placed it on the snout. Copies of this incorrect view still appeared 138 years later.

Mantell was the world’s first authority on dinosaurs; four of the five dinosaurs then known had been discovered by him and his wife. Although his life had been enriched with so many discoveries, after his wife left him and he suffered his fall, the pain became increasingly severe. Eventually, on November 10, 1852, Mantell over-dosed on the laudanum, and he died that same afternoon. He was 62. Opinions are divided as to whether it was an accidental overdose or suicide. At autopsy, it was discovered that his vertebral column had curved, a condition now known as scoliosis.44 After the post-mortem dissection, a section of his spine was removed and preserved for study, and it remained in the pathology museum collection of the Royal College of Surgeons of England until 1969 when it was unceremoniously thrown away, due to a lack of storage space. In 2000, to commemorate Mantell’s discovery, a monument was unveiled at Whiteman’s Green, Cuckfield, where Mary Ann had found that first tooth. Maidstone, where the celebrated ‘Mantell-piece’ slab had been retrieved, adopted the iguanodon on its coat of arms. On the town’s crest, a lion supports a shield on the right, with an iguanodon on the left. The official designation is written in the ancient blend of Norman French and English beloved of heraldry specialists:

Arms: Or a Fesse wavy Azure between three Torteaux on a Chief Gules a Lion passant guardant Or.

Crest: Issuant from a Mural Crown Or a Horse’s Head Argent gorged with a Chaplet of Hops fructed proper, Mantled Azure doubled Or.

Supporters: On the dexter side an Iguanodon proper collared Gules and on the sinister side a Lion Or collared Gules.

Motto: AGRICULTURE AND COMMERCE.

In the Maidstone Museum, there is a stained-glass window with the iguanodon on display. Neither the published version of the iguanodon, nor the one in that window, has that horn on the snout.

Maidstone, close to where the Mantells made their discoveries, was granted a coat of arms in 1619. In 1949 the two supporters either side were added, a collared lion (on the right) and an Iguanodon. This version shows the correct snout.

By this time, new fossil dinosaurs were being discovered in France. Remains of a large creature were described in 1838 by a French palæontologist, Jacques Amand Eudes-Deslongchamps, who lived in Normandy. He didn’t have much to go on; bones from the abdomen, a front- and hind-limb, the tail, and three types of ribs. He decided to name it Poekilopleuron from the Greek ποίκιλος (poikilos, varied) and πλευρών (pleuron, rib), and the bones were donated to the Museum of the Faculty of Science at Caen. During World War II an Allied bombing raid demolished the department and all the fossils were destroyed. However, plaster casts had been made, so copies survived in the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris and the Peabody Museum at Yale. This dinosaur was about 23 feet (7 metres) long and weighed about 5 tons. It would have lived 167 million years ago and was similar to Megalosaurus.

Although people are taught that the science of dinosaurs began with Richard Owen, the eminent anatomist, he did not begin his serious research until the 1840s and we have seen how far the study of dinosaurs had already advanced. Owen was certainly brilliant, and he was also a tireless investigator. In his early days he had only a few fragmented fossils available for study, yet from this he was able to deduce something of the appearance of an entire dinosaur, and even gain some insights into dinosaur physiology; yet he was also dishonest, vain, vindictive and quarrelsome. Owen frequently claimed the discoveries of others as his own, and was self-righteous in the extreme. He argued repeatedly with Charles Darwin, and refused to accept the theory of evolution. Owen enrolled at the University of Edinburgh Medical School in 1824 aged 20, but – like Darwin, who enrolled at the same school the following year – he was dissatisfied with the quality of instruction and decided instead to study under John Barclay, a convinced anti-materialist. The great debate of the time was the duality of body and soul, and Barclay firmly insisted that life was founded upon a Vital Principle while the individual identity rested in the Soul. Although science was increasingly seen as offering an explanation for living organisms, Barclay adhered rigidly to his non-material views. Neither Darwin nor Owen graduated in Edinburgh, Owen eventually being apprenticed to John Abernathy in London. A philosopher and surgeon, Abernathy was president of the Royal College of Surgeons, and he was instrumental in obtaining membership of the College for Owen in 1826. Charles Darwin, meanwhile, went on his extended holiday as the travelling companion to the captain of HMS Beagle.

Owen’s first professional task was to assist William Clift, conservator of the Royal College of Surgeons, in cataloguing the collection of 13,000 human and zoological specimens that had been amassed by the eminent surgeon John Hunter. A previous custodian of the papers had been Sir Everard Home, that unscrupulous surgeon who had published many of Hunter’s discoveries as his own, and who set fire to the entire archive when an investigation into his conduct loomed near. It fell to Owen to identify what remained in order to rebuild the list. By 1830 he had sorted the documents and identified every anatomical specimen, and was about to publish the full catalogue of the Hunterian Collection. By that time he was accepted as the main authority on Hunter’s voluminous work. In July 1835 he married Clift’s daughter, Caroline Amelia, and they had one son, William. In 1837 Owen was charged with delivering the first series of Hunterian Public Lectures, and his reputation grew to such an extent that he was appointed to teach natural history to the children of Queen Victoria; but his professional attitude remained obdurate, demanding and unpleasant. Charles Darwin (who attended many of Owen’s lectures) wrote later that Owen became his enemy after the Origin of Species was published ‘not owing to any quarrel between us, but as far as I could judge out of jealousy at its success.’

Fossil dinosaurs were also being discovered elsewhere in England. In the late summer of 1834, the curator of the Bristol Institution, Samuel Stutchbury, accompanied his surgeon friend Henry Riley on an expedition to Clifton. Riley had been intrigued by the news of the newly discovered ‘saurian’ fossils and took his friend to prospect in the quarry of Durdham Down, on the outskirts of Bristol. There were repeated reports of strange bones being discovered by quarrymen. It seemed that these bones might also be from gigantic prehistoric reptiles, and a short report was published in the U.S. in 1835.45

Theirs proved to be a small dinosaur, measuring some 6 feet 6 inches (2 metres) in length and weighing no more than 55 pounds (25 kg). The men were a diligent pair of investigators and they made a significant observation: in lizards, the roots of the teeth merge with the jawbone, but they noted that their dinosaur was different. It possessed tooth sockets, much like those of mammals. In their formal paper the following year they gave their discovery its name: Thecodontosaurus, derived from the Greek θήκή (thēkē, socket) and οδους (odous, tooth) – so here was yet another new dinosaur for scientists to study.46

Their searches also turned up teeth of phytosaurian dinosaurs that they named Paleosaurus cylindrodon and P. platyodon. Although they didn’t know it, that generic name had already been thought up by Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, so the proposed name was soon abandoned. As Thecodontosaurus this became the fifth dinosaur to be academically named, following Megalosaurus, Iguanodon, Streptospondylus and Hylæosaurus. The fossil was later provided with an appropriate species name, T. antiquus.

Palæontology has long attracted peculiar people, and few were more eccentric than a collector named Thomas Hawkins. Although we imagine the early palæontologists trudging across barren rocks and scrambling into quarries, many of them, as we have seen, adopted a more leisurely approach – they simply purchased specimens dug up by quarrymen, or bought them from specialist dealers like Mary Anning. The young Hawkins was loquacious, brash and bullying, difficult to get on with and given to outbursts of pugnacious prose. He was the son of a wealthy farmer who, rather than encouraging his wayward son to work with him on the family farm in Somerset, gave him a generous allowance to stay away. As a result, the young Hawkins was able to indulge his new passion for fossil collecting and proudly boasted that, by the age of 20 (in 1830), he already had a large and varied collection. He used to wander round the quarries near Walton and Street in Somerset, watching out for discoveries the quarrymen were making. On several occasions, he saw a priceless fossil in a slab of rock that a worker was about to break up and he promptly stepped in with an offer of largesse that could not be refused. He soon gained a reputation for being someone who would pay good money for these fossils whenever they came to light, and so his collection grew, while he had no need to soil his hands by digging. Yet he soon encountered a problem faced by every collector: fossil remains were hardly ever complete. Quite often, valuable fragments were lost as stone was chipped away from the specimen. Dinosaur skeletons usually had limbs missing and often there was no skull (as in the case of Anning’s first ichthyosaur, and the Brontosaurus later described by Marsh). Early in his career, Hawkins became adept at cleaning up fossils and replaced any parts that were missing with dyed plaster. Today, it is acceptable to create an entire dinosaur skeleton from just a few fossil fragments, but at that time any restoration was frowned upon. Mantell summed up Hawkins perfectly as ‘a very young man who has more money than wit’.

Hawkins was a proselytizing Christian and firmly believed in Adam and Eve. Yet he also followed the latest trends in scientific discovery, and formed the view that fossils could reveal what the world was like before humans had been created. The early Earth, he thought, was an alien and hostile place, bathed in murky darkness that sunlight could not penetrate, and peopled by strange monstrous beings that were intent on destruction. On one of his casual visits to a quarry, he found that the tail of a huge ichthyosaur had been laid bare by a workman. The men had agreed to dig out the rest in a few days’ time, but Hawkins was insistent that the job should be done at once. It was already dusk – but he made them fetch candles and lamps, and work on through the night. Eventually, the rocky strata bearing the fossil were laid out in pieces on a wagon, ready to be transported to Hawkins’ home on the farm. It took him several weeks to chip away the rock to release the whole animal, but in the end he was confronted by an ichthyosaur measuring some 7 feet (2 metres) from nose to tail. The hunks of rock bearing the skeleton were assembled together in a wooden frame, and the result was an entire animal – or almost entire. Whatever was missing, Hawkins created out of plaster that he carefully stained to match the rest of the rock. This gave a convincing result – at least, it did for anybody who wanted to be impressed by the entire creature. For the palæontologists of the time, it posed problems. If you were not certain whether the fossil was entire, it was impossible to tell the real fossil from the replacement plaster, so describing the skeleton accurately would be scientifically invalid.

None of this mattered to the irrepressible and domineering Hawkins. Within a few weeks he had himself forgotten which parts of a fossil were original and which he had created from plaster. The creature looked impressive in its apparent completeness, and that was all that mattered to him. His wish was not to pursue scholarship, but to exhibit monsters from a bygone age. If they had pieces missing, he felt it his duty to bring them back to a state of perfection – only then could their prehistoric magnificence be appreciated. His is a very modern attitude. Present-day palæontologists think nothing of recreating vast skeletons of imaginary dinosaurs from plastic, when in reality only a very few bones have been discovered. What was considered unprofessional in Hawkins’ time is carried out on a grander scale today.

In 1833 Hawkins heard that an ichthyosaur skeleton had emerged on low-lying rocks at Lyme Regis. He travelled to the town, and discovered that it could be accessed only at low tide. Hawkins paid a guinea for the finder to grant him the right to own the fossil (£1 1s, now worth about £60 or $80) and told him to assemble a group of workmen, ready to excavate the entire skeleton. He could not resist telling Mary Anning of his find, and she warned him that the rock in which this fossil lay was likely to crumble as it dried. She said it was marl, and she knew that it was rich in iron pyrites (fool’s gold, FeS2). For the next few days no work took place – storms blew in from the west and the beaches were suddenly inaccessible.

By the time the sky had cleared and the winds had dropped, Hawkins was desperate to extract his new fossil from the beach. At low tide the men were sent to work, and they managed to dig out a large hunk of rock which contained the entire skeleton. It was taken to Hawkins’ home where he set to work with his ‘magic chisel’, and within weeks it was ready for display. Any parts that were missing were created out of the plaster, so the finished result owed as much to Hawkins’ creative impulses as it did to nature. By this time, he was spending the winter months in London, mingling whenever he could with the great palæontologists of the day, and he soon managed to become acquainted with William Buckland. Buckland expressed admiration for Hawkins’ fossil collection. He was particularly impressed by the pristine cleanliness of the specimens Hawkins had prepared and also by their astonishing completeness. Hawkins was delighted, and carefully cultivated the relationship, talking always of the might of the Creator, the power of nature, and the evil intent of these denizens from the unfathomable past. These fossils represented grim brutes, he insisted, lusting for blood. Encouraged by Buckland, Hawkins soon set about writing up his discoveries for publication. Many of them appeared in his first book, which came out in 1834.47

The text was filled with imprecations about the majesty of the creation, and the evil of the monsters that mankind had overcome. He solicited Buckland’s support for a proposal to sell his fossil collection to the British Museum for £4,000 (now about £200,000 or $240,000). The management would have none of it, and asked for external opinions as to the real value. Buckland was recommended as a referee by Hawkins, and Mantell was also asked to provide a valuation. Buckland totted up the individual specimens, and provisionally said they were worth between £1,000 and £1,500. Eventually, he decided upon £1,250 as the right price. Mantell separately sent in his own valuation; it came to almost exactly the same sum of money. Doubtless the two men had discussed the total between them, for surely this could not have been coincidence. They wrote to Hawkins, who replied in his oleaginous and glowingly complimentary tone, praising both men for their scholarship and wisdom, and proposing that – as a gesture of his own generosity – the price could perhaps be £2,300. Eventually, after further argument, Hawkins reluctantly accepted £1,250.

Henry Riley and Samuel Stutchbury found fossils of Thecodontosaurus at Clifton near Bristol in 1834, and their paper illustrated the jaw, teeth, part of the ilium, vertebræ and a rib (bottom). The genus was not recognized as a dinosaur until 1870.

No sooner were the specimens in the museum’s possession in 1835 than the Keeper of Natural History, Charles König, began to make arrangements for them to go on display. His first choice was a magnificent specimen of an ichthyosaur measuring 25 feet (7.5 metres) long. Everything was immaculate, and the skeleton was perfect in every detail. Naturally, König was concerned; no fossil is ever likely to be entirely complete. Yet nothing seemed to be wrong with the skeleton. Curiously, he looked again at the illustration that Hawkins had printed in his catalogue of the collection – and suddenly he could see something odd. The original lithograph showed that the skeleton had not been complete when Hawkins had first illustrated it. Half the tail was missing, and the right forelimb was shown only as a dotted outline, indicating that it was not present when the fossil had been found. The ‘perfect’ skeleton had been made up with dyed plaster. Hawkins had protested in his negotiations that his perfect specimens were all genuine, and were testimony to his skill as a conservator, but it was suddenly clear how he had been improving on nature. Buckland and Mantell were both informed immediately, since König now felt that the specimens were worth far less than the museum had paid. He wrote to say that the fossils could not be put on display after all, since so much was plaster, and said that he would await further instructions. Buckland, against all expectations, rose to the defence of Hawkins. He insisted that no suggestion had ever been made that the specimens were entirely natural. It was only to be expected, he went on, that repairs here and there were necessary in restoring a skeleton, and there was definitely no hint of ‘fraud or collusion’ on his part.

None of this debacle helped the museum’s reputation, which was already being investigated by an inquiry set up by the House of Commons. When König came before the committee, he was cautious about the whole affair, admitting that the skeletons were less than perfect, and agreeing that the price of £1,250 may have been a little more than the fossil collection was worth. Hawkins railed against König, accusing him of pretending that the specimens were imperfect, when in fact all such specimens had merely been cosmetically improved. Mantell thought that Hawkins had been guilty of double-dealing, but put it down to mental instability. The specimen, along with others from the collection, is in the collections of the Natural History Museum in London, identified as Temnodontosaurus platyodon. You can still see tiny indentations all over the specimen. These are the dents left by the point of König’s knife, as he probed to distinguish between plaster and stone. All the plaster additions were subsequently painted to be subtly different, and this reveals that – in addition to the forelimb and the tail – many of the ribs, the tips of the hindlimbs, and even a vertebra, had all been constructed out of plaster by Hawkins. In truth, the skeleton is partly faked and was worth considerably less than a perfect specimen.

Not only was Hawkins unreliable as a conveyor of fossils, but in his writing he frequently substituted his own invented Latin names for those already granted to the fossils he found. He often complained that neither Latin nor Greek was good enough for naming fossils – the language in which they should be named, he insisted, was Hebrew. On he rambled, and soon published a second book, with yet more of his startling revelations. The book has an extraordinary style and is virtually unreadable. Here, for example, is a passage from Chapter V:

The sublime discloses itself only in the silence of which we speak, when, by the most stupendous Efforts of Intellect, by the revivification of Worlds, by the inhabitation thereof of all the Creatures which the labouring Soul can re-articulate, we stand in a Presence which has not, nor ever shall have, one sympathy with ourselves; those Worlds, those antipodal Populations, that Presence passion less, and silent dead; I say the instruments of a few bones verify a Sublimity before which no man can stand unappalled.

And so it drones on, perhaps the most impenetrable prose in the history of science.48

When Hawkins heard of the findings of the House of Commons Committee and its report on the part-plaster skeletons, he immediately threatened to sue for defamation. He was given to litigation. Thus, when a visitor at a nearby property casually picked some fruit from his strawberry patch, Hawkins was accused of using ‘disproportionate violence’ in protesting. He ended up in a legal dispute, meanwhile declaring himself the Earl of Kent.

Richard Owen was becoming increasingly intrigued by the reports of fossilized giant reptiles, and knew of some bones that had been described by an amateur palæontologist, John Kingdon, in a communication to the Geological Society of June 1825. Most learned opinion at the time was still that these were fossils of familiar creatures – porpoises, perhaps, or possibly extinct crocodiles – but Owen was an experienced anatomist and was certain this was wrong. In 1841 he decided the newly discovered fossils represented reptilian animals and he named the genus Cetiosaurus. He was only half right – although Owen had correctly determined that these were reptiles, he concluded they were swimming creatures, somewhat like plesiosaurs, which is why he coined the name cetiosaur from the Greek κήτειος (kèteios, sea-monster). Owen wanted to learn more, and one day late in 1841 he hastened to 15 Aldersgate Street, near St Paul’s Cathedral, to visit his colleague William Devonshire Saull, a businessman and an avid collector of antiquities. Saull had amassed a collection of 20,000 specimens (most of them antiquities from the Middle East) which he had carefully catalogued and labelled. Many were of geological specimens, and some – the important specimens that Owen wanted to inspect – were fossils. Saull was a long-standing friend of Mantell, and they had often exchanged specimens. Among the many relics Saull showed him, Owen picked up a piece of Iguanodon bone, and turned it over in his hands. He knew of the various other gigantic specimens that collectors had unearthed – Megalosaurus, Mosasaurus, his own Cetiosaurus – and was suddenly inspired. These were not just creatures from the past, reminders of now-extinct worlds populated by animals like those of the present day; Owen became convinced that these all belonged to a single great family of reptiles. He suddenly realized that they were different from all the other reptiles we knew. Whereas present-day lizards have sprawling legs that splay out either side, these giant reptiles had downward-pointing limbs that functioned like columns to support their weight on dry land. He speculated that dinosaurs might have been warm-blooded, and he noted that they had five vertebræ fused to form the pelvic girdle, which he knew was not the case with other reptiles. Later discoveries would show he wasn’t entirely correct (some dinosaurs have different numbers of fused sacral vertebræ), but he was right to recognize these as a new group of huge, extinct monsters. This was a crucial breakthrough, and Owen decided to announce his conclusions at the eleventh annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science.

These bones of a young Iguanodon were excavated from Cowleaze Chine on the Isle of Wight and were included by Richard Owen in his monumental work A History of British Fossil Reptiles published by Cassells of London between 1849 and 1884.

The presentation took place on August 2, 1841, on a grey, dank day in London. Owen was a tremendous draw; Cuvier had died in 1832 and Owen had now become Europe’s most renowned zoologist. He had lectured on fossil reptiles before, but this time was different – this was to be his announcement of an entire new class of gigantic reptiles. He began by courteously acknowledging the pioneering discoveries made by William Buckland and Gideon Mantell, both of whom he acknowledged with respect. Then he reviewed what was known about crocodiles, and their similarities to plesiosaurs. And then he moved on to the meat of the argument, and began by describing three genera that he was going to analyze in detail: the herbivorous Iguanodon, the carnivorous Megalosaurus and the armoured Hylæosaurus. These, he said, were different from anything alive. These, he told his audience, formed a distinctly new tribe. Gone was the notion that these were merely long-lost forms of animals that were similar to those still in existence; these were a form of life that nobody had ever seen. His audience was spellbound. So many people had accepted that they were ancient forms of crocodiles, or something similar, but Owen was adamant. Megalosaurus, he explained, was not a gigantic sprawling lizard, but a huge reptile that stood upright on powerful vertical legs. His new image of Iguanodon was of a great monster, standing tall on massive hindlimbs, and towering above the lesser beings that were dotted about its forest landscape. With his majestic prose and his own charismatic powers of oration, Owen had the audience entranced as he radically revised the previous size estimates published by his colleagues. Mantell, he said, had erred in scaling up the size of the limb bones of an iguana to an iguanodon, and reaching an overall length of 75 feet (23 metres). Far better was it to scale up the dimensions of each single vertebra. This posed a problem in knowing how many vertebræ there were in the backbone, for most of the skeletons had a spine that was far from complete. But his calculations worked well: he concluded that an iguanodon would have measured about 28 feet (8.5 metres) from nose to tail, a far more realistic figure that fits well with what we know today. Owen made mistakes of his own in his talk: he described Thecodontosaurus as a lizard, and Cetiosaurus as a crocodile, though we now know that both are sauropod dinosaurs. Sometime after the lecture, he coined a new taxonomic name to define the entire group. He resolved to call them Dinosauria, which he said would distinguish the entire ‘distinct tribe or sub-order of Saurian Reptiles’. The word came from the Greek δεινός (deinos, terrible, awesome) and the familiar σαῦρος (sauros, lizard). It is a curious term, in that dinosaurs are definitely reptiles but are certainly not lizards, nor are they descended from them. This new term Dinosauria first appeared in the Report on British Fossil Reptiles, published the year following Owen’s momentous lecture.49

Throughout his speech, Owen adhered to a strictly creationist view. He was convinced that these creatures had been made by divine providence, and the anatomical peculiarities he observed were, he insisted, the sure sign of intelligent design. He remained obdurate in these opinions, and was strongly opposed to any idea of evolutionary progress. He discussed these matters with Charles Darwin on many occasions, and the two became friends for a while. But when Darwin published his Origin of Species in 1859, Owen was to write a scathing review that he published anonymously. In later years, there was strong animosity between the two. Others had certainly laid the groundwork for this great revelation of the dinosaurs, even though it was Owen who coined the name. To this day, he is heralded as their great discoverer. As the BBC put it, Richard Owen is ‘the man who invented the dinosaur’.