The Dinosaur Hunters: A True Story of Scientific Rivalry and the Discovery of the Prehistoric World

William Conybeare, it seems, was as zealous in his search for fossils as Buckland, and their activities never failed to attract attention. Once on a tour together they entered an inn after a particularly long, wet day on the cliffs, covered in mud and dirt. The two deans had fossil bags filled to bursting and proceeded to empty out the contents. The old woman serving their meal was said to be ‘much puzzled to make out the Deans’ real character’. After eyeing her ravenous customers suspiciously, she exclaimed, ‘Well I never. Fancy two real gentlemen picking up stones! What won’t men do for money!’

In trying to create a map showing the order of succession of the rock strata of England, Buckland and his friends were greatly influenced by the pioneering work of a surveyor called William Smith. A man of humble birth, Smith lived at the height of the ‘Canal Age’ in the late eighteenth century, when the fields of England were criss-crossed by a network of over two thousand miles of inland waterways. As he surveyed the land for canal building, he had become very familiar with the sequential order of British rock from the chalk down to the coal. He noticed that different strata contained different fossils and that this could be used to help identify some of the layers. Such was his enthusiasm to understand the order of strata that Smith devoted his modest income to travelling all over England. Versions of his geological tables had been on display since the 1790s, and he published his great map A Delineation of the Strata of England and Wales in 1815.

Unfortunately for Smith, George Bellas Greenough, the first President of the Geological Society, had little time for him and his map. When he saw Smith’s tables he was condescending and patronising and yet, it has been argued, with ‘barefaced piracy’ he was able to draw heavily on this work for the benefit of the Society. Undoubtedly Smith’s studies laid the groundwork for Buckland, who between 1814 and 1821 produced no less than eight different charts of the ‘Order of super-imposition of strata in the British Islands’.

All of this made little impression on the canons and bishops at Oxford. Scholars and religious leaders were alarmed that the sacred evidence of the word of God should be muddied with bits of rock and dirt. ‘Was ever the Word of God, laid so deplorably prostrate at the feet of an infant and precocious science!’ exclaimed George Bugg, author of Scriptural Geology. ‘We want no better guide than Moses,’ wrote George Cumberland to the editor of the popular Monthly Magazine in 1815. ‘If the object of geology be to attain the age of the earth as a planet, it seems an idle proceeding; first because if attained, it would apparently be useless … it can never be attained by the present mode of enquiry; and like the riddle of the Sphinx, would destroy the life of those who failed in solving it, by wearing out the only valuable property they have, viz, their intellects!’

For years, dons wielding authority through their sermons and sacred texts had successfully kept alternative schools of thought at bay. Among the more traditional scholars there was a real fear that geology would prove to be a ‘dangerous innovation’, and Buckland’s odd activities were watched ‘with an interest not wholly devoid of fear’. At the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1816, when Buckland took the opportunity to travel with Conybeare and Greenough across Europe, his departure was welcomed by some of the elderly classicists at Oxford. ‘Well Buckland has gone,’ announced one dean with satisfaction. ‘Thank God we will hear no more of this Geology!’ Nothing could have been further from the truth.

In 1816, Buckland published the first comparative table of the strata of England compared with those of the Continent. Similarities between the rocks of England and Europe were beginning to emerge. Greywacke slates, resembling the continental Transition formations, were found on the borders of England and Wales. Highly stratified layers of sandstone, limestone and conglomerates rich with fossils, like the Secondary formations of Europe, were widespread across England. Tertiary rocks, such as those around Paris, were identified in the London and Hampshire basins. Just as in Europe, these were always in the same order of succession, the oldest being Primary, then Transition, Secondary and Tertiary. As correlations were found between different regions, ‘marker’ rocks were identified. Chalk, for instance, was recognised as the upper limit of Secondary rock throughout Europe.

Buckland was keen to discover whether this order of succession extended worldwide. He wrote to several noblemen in command of Britain’s growing Empire, such as Lord Bathurst, the Secretary of the British Colonies, enclosing instructions for collecting geological specimens abroad. His appetite for information became insatiable: it was as if the layers of rock that enveloped the globe formed the pages of a history of the earth. But if this was so, what would be written on them? And how did all this fit with the extraordinary ‘crocodile’ found by Mary Anning?

The first clue to this puzzle lay in a remarkable new approach to interpreting fossils that was being pioneered in Paris by a French naturalist called Georges Cuvier. From a poor but bourgeois family, Cuvier had survived the French Revolution in Normandy, far from the troubles of Paris, where in his letters he had feigned support for the regime for fear of the French police. Once the Reign of Terror had released its grip on Paris and the city became safe again, Cuvier went to the capital and soon secured a post at the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle. With his striking crop of red hair, bright-blue eyes and somewhat unkempt appearance, it wasn’t long before the ambitious young naturalist had made an impression.

As Napoleon’s army swept across Europe, spoils from museums and private collections were frequently sent back to Paris. Fossils were also retrieved from the plaster quarries around Paris, and during the course of building canals around the city. The new Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, established by the Republicans in place of the Jardin du Roi, rapidly became the envy of the world. Cuvier began to apply his extensive knowledge of the anatomy of living creatures to try to interpret fossil skeletons with a view to understanding the ancient forms of life.

Georges Cuvier believed that fundamental laws must govern the anatomy of creatures as surely as the laws established by Newton now governed physics. If a creature was a carnivore, Cuvier observed, all of its organs would be designed for this purpose. The forelimbs would be strong enough to grasp prey; the hind-limbs muscular and mobile, for hunting; the teeth would be sharp, capable of ripping meat; the jaw would have sufficient muscular support for the animal to tear prey; and the digestive organs would be adapted for carnivorous food. In effect, Cuvier’s principle of ‘correlation of parts’ showed that all the organs and limbs of a creature are interdependent and must function together for that creature to survive. He rapidly acquired a brilliant reputation. From a single fossil bone, he declared, he could deduce the class of the beast – whether it was a mammal, reptile or bird – and ascertain subordinate divisions: the order, family, genus (plural: genera), and perhaps even the very species to which the fossil animal belonged.

‘Let us not search further for the mythological animals,’ said Cuvier. ‘The mantichore or destroyer of men which carries a human head on a lion’s body terminating in a scorpion’s tail, or the guardian of treasures, the Griffin, half eagle–half lion … Nature could not combine such impossible features.’ The teeth and jaws of a lion, for example, could only belong to a creature that possessed the other attributes of a powerful carnivore, a muscular frame and skeleton that would confer enormous strength. The Sphinx of Thebes, the Pegasus of Thessaly, the Minotaur of Crete, mermaids – those half-women half-fish that lured sailors to their death with the sweetness of their song – were all myths that crumbled under Cuvier’s scientific scrutiny. ‘These fantastic compositions may be recovered among ruins,’ he said, ‘but they certainly do not represent real beings.’ Instead, Georges Cuvier offered a real past, conjuring up a vivid picture of creatures that had once roamed the surface of the earth.

Less than two years after his arrival in Paris, in January 1796, the twenty-seven-year-old naturalist made his debut at the National Institute of Sciences and Arts. His talk ‘On the species of living and fossil elephants’ pointed to an astonishing conclusion.

Following French victories in Holland, a private collection of fossil ‘elephants’ at the Hague had been seized and sent to Paris. Cuvier had compared these fossils from Holland to the bones of present-day elephants from India and Africa. As he studied the characteristics of the teeth and jaw he realised that the fossil ‘elephant’ differed in the shape and proportions of the jaw from either of the two living species. On the basis of these differences, he argued, the fossil ‘elephant’ should be classified as a separate species. The distribution of the fossil bones also differed; unlike the Indian or African elephant, the fossil species was never found in the tropics. He gave the fossil elephant a special name in recognition of its differences: the ‘mammoth’.

Since mammoths differed from any living elephants, reasoned Cuvier, this species was now extinct. The discovery, soon after this, of the first preserved mammoth in the permafrost of Siberia lent weight to his ideas. Cuvier believed the snowy wastes of Northern Europe and Siberia had once been inhabited by these enormous woolly beasts, which had somehow mysteriously perished. And he went on to show that other large fossil mammals, apart from the mammoth, had thrived on the ancient globe. He identified ‘Megatherium’, or ‘huge beast’, a creature resembling a giant sloth and covered in fur like a bear, which could stand on two legs to graze on leaves. An elephantine creature whose fossils combined the teeth of a hippopotamus with the huge tusks of a mammoth was named by Cuvier a ‘mastodon’.

Cuvier’s large extinct mammals, the mammoth, the mastodon and Megatherium, were found in the most recent, Tertiary deposits. In older strata Cuvier identified an ancient sea lizard, ‘Mosasaurus’ or ‘lizard of the Meuse’, and several extinct species of crocodile. His studies suggested that entire animal races had been wiped from the face of the earth. He was haunted by the desire to know what had happened to the vanished creatures. Why would God create these beings if He planned only to destroy them? Cuvier wanted to ascertain whether ‘species which existed then have been entirely destroyed, or if they have merely been modified in their form, or if they have simply been transported from one climate into another’. Quite why and how extinction occurred was a puzzle that remained to be solved.

William Buckland was impressed by Cuvier’s discoveries and eager to learn from his approach, comparing fossil animals to living creatures so as to work out their zoological affinities. He discussed Mary Anning’s unknown creature with his friend the Reverend Conybeare, who wanted to make a definitive scientific study of the giant beast. Mary’s ‘crocodile’ possessed such a puzzling blend of characteristics that it was hard to classify. The long, pointed snout was similar to a dolphin’s or porpoise’s. The teeth were more like those of a crocodile, with sharp, conical fangs, each one ridged all around the enamel. The vertebrae were slender, like the backbone of a fish. It was baffling.

To compound their problems, England did not have a centre of anatomical excellence comparable to the magnificent collections under Cuvier’s supervision in Paris. Consequently, Buckland tried to establish a correspondence with Cuvier, ‘founded on an exchange of fossil specimens’, and hoped to benefit from the French expertise.

It was to Lyme that the Reverends Buckland and Conybeare went in search of fossil ‘crocodiles’ as gifts for Cuvier, and in particular to the collection of Mary Anning.

Mary and her mother had established a ‘tiny, old curiosity shop close to the beach’. According to one visitor, ‘the most remarkable petrifactions and fossil remains … were exhibited in the window’. Inside, the little shop and adjoining chamber were ‘crammed with ammonites, heads of “crocodiles”, and boxes of shells’. To Mary’s skills as a collector, Buckland acknowledged, he felt greatly indebted, for she continued to supply more specimens of her unknown creature. Cuvier was interested to see the latest discoveries from England, and soon Buckland established a correspondence with a young assistant in Cuvier’s department, Joseph Pentland. Pentland acted as liaison between Cuvier and the English team, organising shipments of casts and providing information on fossils.

But while Buckland and his colleagues were approaching Georges Cuvier, another London gentleman, Sir Everard Home, raced into print with the first published account of Mary’s creature. Although Sir Everard relished his reputation as Britain’s leading anatomist and held the distinguished position of Surgeon to the King, he was in fact not only incompetent, but also a fraud. Much of his fame was due to reflected glory from John Hunter, his famous brother-in-law.

John Hunter was revered in England as the ‘father of modern surgery’ and had pioneered early studies of anatomy before his sudden death from a heart attack. Sir Everard was secretly plagiarising Hunter’s unpublished manuscripts. He had removed ‘a cartload’ of Hunter’s anatomical papers from the Royal College of Surgeons in London. Once he had copied them out in his own name, he allegedly burned Hunter’s originals. Such was his enthusiasm to demolish the evidence, on one occasion Sir Everard set fire to his own hearth and had to call out the fire brigade.

In his first paper to the Royal Society in 1814, Sir Everard initially favoured the idea that Mary Anning’s creature was some kind of crocodile. This was because he had noticed small germs of conical teeth contained within the larger teeth. Whereas mammals have just two sets of teeth, the milk teeth and the adult teeth, reptiles have replacement teeth growing through the jaw all their lives. But when Sir Everard split one of the teeth open, he mistook the young germ tooth inside for an accumulation of calcareous minerals. ‘The characteristic mark therefore, of a crocodile’s teeth,’ he wrote, ‘was thus removed.’ He wrongly concluded that it was not a reptile.

Then he reasoned that it must be an enormous aquatic bird, since the pattern of openings in the skull of the creature was similar to that of birds. The bones of the eye, he wrote, ‘subdivided into thirteen plates, which is only met in birds’. But if it was a bird, where were the wings, and why so many fish-like characteristics? Sir Everard considered that the lower jaw of the skull ‘admits the mouth to be opened to a great extent … resembling the voracious fishes’. New specimens revealed the ‘bird’ had paddles for swimming, and he decided the creature belonged to the class of fishes; although, somewhat baffled, he wrote, ‘I by no means consider it wholly a fish.’

After his initial uncertainty over whether the beast should be classed as reptile, bird or fish, by 1819 Sir Everard thought he had solved the puzzle. A new creature called a ‘Proteus’ had just been described in English by a Viennese physician. This was a blind, amphibious, serpentine creature with very unusual anatomical features that inhabited caves. Mistakenly guessing that the Lyme ‘crocodile’ was a link between the Proteus and lizards, he named it ‘Proteosaurus’, or ‘Proteus-lizard’. However, the year before, Mary Anning’s creature had been sold to the British Museum, where the Keeper of Natural History, Charles Konig, had named her animal ‘Ichthyosaurus’, meaning ‘fish-lizard’. This was in recognition of its curious mixture of fish and reptile characteristics. Since this name had been put forward first, it had priority over any other. Sir Everard Home was furious, and he continued to promote his own rival name, ‘Proteosaurus’.

In all this confusion, one thing was clear: the French were laughing at the English grasp of anatomy. Joseph Pentland, in Cuvier’s laboratory, scoffed at the papers of the ‘London Baronet’, as he called Sir Everard. He wrote to William Buckland in Oxford saying that Sir Everard’s ‘ridiculous’ papers were ‘abstruse, incomprehensible and for the most part, uninteresting’. What is more, the London Baronet was ‘crowding’ the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, the prestigious journal of the oldest scientific society of Europe, blocking the publications of others whose work was more ‘worthy and honourable’.

Possibly because Sir Everard dominated the Royal Society, Buckland’s friends, the Reverend Conybeare and another enthusiastic young geologist, Henry de la Beche, prepared their detailed scientific paper on Mary’s creature for the Geological Society. They gathered many more specimens from Lyme and the Bristol area and were also able to capitalise on the anatomical expertise of the French. ‘I am sure that the fossil approaches much nearer to the family of Saurians [lizards],’ wrote Pentland to Buckland in 1820. ‘The dentition of the Ichthyosaurus is the same as in lizards.’

Conybeare and de la Beche published their findings in 1821. In agreement with the French, they showed that the teeth of the animal bore more resemblance to those of a crocodile than to any other creature. The replacement cycle of teeth so characteristic of a reptile, with ‘the young tooth growing up in the interior cavity of the old one,’ wrote Conybeare, ‘is exactly similar’. The bones of the skull were also lizard-like, with two openings at the back behind the eye, lightening the skull and allowing the muscles of the jaw to bulge so that it could work more efficiently. In the lower jaw alone, all the bones that Cuvier had identified in a crocodile could also be seen in this animal.

There were, however, some differences between Mary’s fossil and a crocodile skull. The teeth, Conybeare observed, ‘are more numerous than in the crocodile, there cannot be less than 30 a side’. The huge round eyes were larger in proportion to the skull than the eyes of any other known animal. Having no eyelids, to prevent injury in a rough sea, it had instead many thin, flexible bones encasing the pupil to protect it. The general shape of the jaw, he thought, ‘differs from the crocodile in being much more lengthened’, and ending in a point ‘almost as sharp as the beak of a bird’. Nonetheless, in both the dentition and the bone structure the animal ‘approaches more closely to the Saurian or Lizard family, and especially to the genus Crocodile,’ said Conybeare, ‘than to any other recent type’. The fossil beast, therefore, belonged to the reptile class and the saurian family.

Despite this, it had many characteristics of fishes. The vertebrae were just like those of a fish, with small, flat discs allowing enormous flexibility of the spine. The bones were also very light, combining the ‘greatest strength with least weight’, which would ‘increase the buoyancy of the animal and enable it to face the waves of an agitated ocean’. With eighty or ninety such vertebrae, the creature could reach twenty-four feet in length. In view of its fish and lizard affinities Conybeare accepted the name Ichthyosaurus, or ‘fish-lizard’, to denote the genus. While tactfully acknowledging the ‘praise worthy readiness’ with which Sir Everard had communicated his ideas ‘instantly to the public’, his ‘Proteosaurus’ was quietly forgotten. Ichthyosaurus, said Conybeare, roamed the primitive seas ‘upon which no human eye ever rested’. He tried to trace the boundaries of this long-buried sea by seeing how far the fossil remains extended across England. They found ichthyosaurs in many counties in South-west England deposited within the Secondary strata.

As Conybeare and de la Beche searched the Secondary rocks, they came upon other bones, principally vertebrae, which did not quite match those of Ichthyosaurus or of a crocodile. ‘I was persuaded that they had all belonged to different places in the vertebral column of a single species,’ wrote Conybeare. He began to suspect that another unknown sea lizard had shared the ancient ocean with the ichthyosaurs. He proposed the name ‘Enalo-sauri’, or ‘sea lizards’, to denote the whole order, and hinted strongly that more types of these giant sea creatures had yet to be uncovered. The paper was seen as a triumph, and their description of the ichthyosaurs stands to this day.

As for Mary Anning, she hadn’t the education or the position in the world to name her finds or to use them as an entrée to the male-dominated world of science. She was not even named in the scholarly papers on her creature published in London. In her cottage by the sea or sitting on the shore at Lyme, she painstakingly copied out the learned articles in her own hand, making drawings and trying to grasp the language of the new science. There is even a suggestion that she may have tried to learn French in order to read Cuvier for herself. With many French visitors to the port of Lyme, this was not such an impossible feat.

Mary was sufficiently encouraged by her first discovery to persevere in her daily searches on the shore, braving all weathers. The deplorable conditions of five years’ parish relief focused her efforts tremendously as, according to one collector, Thomas Hawkins, she ‘explored the frowning and precipitous cliffs, when the furious spring-tide conspired with the howling tempest to overthrow them, and rescued [fossils] from the gaping ocean, sometimes at the peril of her life’. The dangers Mary faced were also noted by a gentleman’s daughter, Anna Maria Pinney, who sometimes explored the cliffs with her: ‘we climbed down places, which I would have thought impossible to have descended had I been alone. The wind was high, the ground slippery, and the waves beating against Church Cliff. When we had clambered to the bottom our dangers were by no means over … In one place she had to make haste to pass between the dashing of two waves … she caught me with one arm round the waist and carried me some distance.’

As news of Mary Anning’s finds spread among the members of the Geological Society several gentlemen, as well as William Buckland, sought her out at Lyme. She was cultivated by Henry de la Beche, who was studying the Ichthyosaurus with Reverend Conybeare. De la Beche was a young man of independent means who had inherited from his father an estate in Jamaica, which had prospered with the slavery trade. A Lieutenant-Colonel Thomas Birch also took a keen interest in gathering fossil evidence of the Ichthyosaurus, and acquired many of her specimens. Anna Pinney noted that Mary was ‘courted by those above her’, and she rapidly acquired ‘many ideas and a power of communicating them’. In spending time with such gentlemen from a very different class, she had already stepped aside from her peasant background. ‘She frankly owns,’ admitted Anna, ‘that the society of her own rank is become distasteful to her.’ Despite this, she continued to ‘attend the sick poor night and day, even when they are ill with infectious diseases’. Whether Mary dared to hope that one day she might escape hardships of her upbringing through marriage is not recorded.

She became a familiar figure on the shoreline, variously portrayed in her long skirts and shawl, clogs, poke-bonnet or hat, a lone figure endlessly toiling at her mysterious task against vast skies and shifting tides. Such was her dedication, Anna Pinney wrote, that she continued ‘to support her mother and brother in bitter poverty even when she was so ill that she was brought … fainting from the beach’.

The layers of rock that so fascinated Mary Anning held the secrets of prehistory. Locked behind the impenetrable dark face of Black Ven and the cliffs beyond were the clues to an ancient ocean, whose boundaries were yet unknown. From her discussions with the gentlemen geologists, Mary knew that another kind of sea lizard was almost certainly buried there, waiting to be uncovered.

2 The World in a Pebble (#ulink_33562582-790f-540b-b3f2-8aec2fd1c91b)

There is no picking up a pebble by the brook side without finding all nature in connexion with it.

Cited in Thoughts on a Pebble by Gideon Mantell, 1849

While Mary Anning was searching the shore for fossils, a young shoemaker’s son, Gideon Algernon Mantell, was trying to make his own way in the world of science. A story told by one of his childhood companions reveals that, like Buckland, Gideon Mantell was drawn to geology early in life:

As a mere youth, he was walking with a friend on the banks of the River Ouse when his observant eye rested on an object which had rolled down the marly bank … He dragged it from the water and examined it with great attention. ‘What is it?’ inquired his friend. ‘I think that it is what they call “a fossil”,’ he replied. ‘I have seen something like it in an old volume of the Gentleman’s Magazine.’ The curiosity, which proved to be a fine specimen of Ammonite, was borne home in triumph … and from that moment young Mantell became a geologist.

It was a revelation to Mantell that buried in the earth beneath their feet lay the ‘wreckage of former lives that had turned to stone’. His home town of Lewes in Sussex is enveloped by the dramatic contours of the chalk South Downs. Past the grammar school, the castle and the Market House, the High Street plunged towards the valley of the River Ouse and the chalk spur beyond loomed above the smoke from the chimneys of the shops. To the south, past the ruined priory, the green fields, decked with white wherever the chalk broke through the thin covering of grass, beckoned Mantell through every cobbled alley-way.

As a child exploring the local pits and quarries he uncovered ammonites with their coils ‘like the fabled horn of Jupiter, Ammon’, and shells with spines, such as the sea urchin, and the remains of corals and fishes; the chalk hills teemed with the worn relics of creatures that had lived long ago. For the young Mantell, science was ‘like the fabled wand of the magician’ which could ‘call forth from the stone and from the rock their hidden lore and reveal the secrets they have so long enshrined’. Every fossil reclaimed from the past was, for him, a ‘medal of creation’, a fantastic page of Nature’s volume to interpret.

Far removed from his vision of ancient worlds was the daily reality of supplying the town’s footwear. He and his six brothers and sisters were brought up in a cottage in St Mary’s Lane, a steep, narrow road that ran off the High Street. At a time when social status was principally determined by money and land, Gideon Mantell was aware of his family’s modest station in life. Although his father, Thomas, ran a successful business, sometimes employing several people, he was a ‘tradesman’, not a ‘gentleman’, and so excluded from the higher ranks of society.

It was a far cry from what Mantell understood of the great wealth of the family’s forebears. In his youth, he dreamed of restoring the family honours. He told a friend, ‘although my parents and their immediate predecessors were in comparatively humble stations, being only trades people in a country town, yet they were descendants of one of the most ancient families in England. The name “Mantell” occurs in the list of Knights that accompanied William the Conqueror from Normandy. The family settled in Northamptonshire and possessed large manors at Heyford and Rode where many of the family bore the honor of a Knighthood.’

But the family fortunes had been lost almost overnight. The grandson of Sir Walter Mantell, a Protestant, took part in Sir Thomas Wyatt’s attempt in 1554 to prevent the Catholic marriage of Queen Mary with Philip of Spain. The planned royal marriage was so unpopular that Wyatt and an array of four thousand men almost reached London Bridge before they were outnumbered and eventually forced to surrender. Wyatt and the ringleaders, including Mantell and his grandson, were executed. As if this was not enough, all the Mantell family estates, in Kent, Sussex and Northamptonshire, were forfeited to the Crown. ‘Irretrievable ruin fell upon the house,’ wrote Gideon Mantell; ‘in my boyish days I fancied I should restore its honors and that my children would have obtained the distinctions our knightly race once bore.’

Mantell’s soaring ambitions were not without foundation, for he was regarded as something of a child prodigy in his home town. He was distinguished by ‘uncommon perseverance and quickness in his studies’. Owing to his pious parents, ‘his retentive memory enabled him when young to repeat a large part of the Bible by heart’. When older, he was described in local records as ‘tall and graceful’, and with a ‘style of brilliancy and eloquence’. A painting of him in his youth shows a handsome face, with even, expressive features and dark hair and eyes. Whether this is a truthful portrait is unknown, but according to the Sussex Gazette he was not lacking in charisma: ‘He had the attractive personality of an actor, a voice of great power, and with clear enunciation and pleasing musical cadences he could hold his listeners spellbound.’

But as the son of a bootmaker, the young Gideon Mantell was educated with great frugality. Because of his father’s nonconformist beliefs as a Methodist, the six children were excluded from the local grammar school; the twelve free places each year were reserved for those brought up in the Anglican faith. Instead, Gideon was sent to the dame-school among the labourers’ cottages in St Mary’s Lane. Here, under the simple guidance of an old woman, he was taught the rudiments of reading and writing in her front parlour, and he became so great a favourite that on her death the teacher left Gideon everything she had. After this, he went to the school of a Mr John Button, an exuberant philosophical radical, ‘where a sound and practical commercial education was given by a gentleman whose political sentiments were so accordant with those of Gideon Mantell’s father, that he was known to be on the Government black list’.

Mr Mantell’s political views are not stated; however, as a radical Whig, it seems likely that he associated with the campaigning Thomas Paine, well known reformer and also an inhabitant of Lewes. Paine was a keen debater at the Headstrong Club which met at the White Hart in the High Street. He openly challenged the value of the British monarchy at a time when the Revolution raged in France, he denounced cruelty to the poor, demanded the abolition of the slave trade, and later wrote The Rights of Man.

After two years with Mr Button, Gideon was sent away for a period of private study with his uncle, a Baptist minister, who had founded a ‘Dissenting Academy for Boys’ near Swindon. When he returned to Lewes at the age of fifteen, with the assistance of the leader of the local Whig party who was impressed by his diligence Gideon was apprenticed to a local surgeon, James Moore. On his father’s death in 1807 money was found for him, in the last year of his ‘bondage’ as apprentice, to study in London and ‘walk the hospitals’.

At seventeen, Mantell went to London to study medicine, carrying a bag full of fossils collected from the chalk hills of Sussex. These curios, somewhat unnecessary for a student doctor, were nonetheless of such importance to Mantell that he had found room for his ‘extensive collection’ on the stagecoach to London. But if he was hoping for an opportunity that would allow him to immediately develop a career in geology he was soon to be disappointed. There were, as yet, no academic posts in the subject, and his father’s Methodism and his educational background precluded him from university.