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

The only way he could begin to make sense of the puzzle was to distinguish the different types of teeth. There seemed to be two sets here that could not have come from the same species of animal. One set of teeth were blade-like and up to three inches long, flattened from side to side, with two sharp edges stretching from the crown. These edges were serrated like a steak knife, constructed for tearing flesh, not eating vegetables. The teeth could only have belonged to a carnivorous animal. And although he couldn’t prove it beyond doubt, Mantell was certain that they belonged to a giant reptile because they were more similar to crocodile teeth than anything he had seen at the Royal College of Surgeons. However, there were some crucial differences. Crocodile teeth are conical, slightly curved, the surface of the enamel covered with ridges radiating longitudinally from the tip to the crown. A crocodile grips its prey, and then flicks its tail in the water to spin, so it can more easily rip and tear off chunks. These unfamiliar, blade-like, carnivorous teeth would have allowed their unknown owner a slicing action, like carving meat.

Even more puzzling was the second set of teeth in his collection, the herbivorous teeth found by his wife. These ‘possessed characters so remarkable that the most superficial observer would have been struck with their appearance as something novel and interesting,’ he wrote. ‘When perfect they must have been of a very considerable size.’ Self-taught, without the backing of a university or membership of a prestigious society, Mantell could hardly claim that these once belonged to a giant herbivorous lizard when such an improbable creature was not supposed to have existed. He might just as well suggest he had found a centaur, a unicorn or a dragon, or some other preposterous creature of ancient myth.

But the most remarkable feature of all was the sheer size of the beasts. Some of the fragments of vertebrae were up to five inches long; there was a part of a rib that measured twenty-one inches long, even the metatarsal bones in the foot were huge and chunky. As he was chiselling away one night, he realised that one particular broken section of thigh bone emerging from the stone indicated an animal far larger than any he knew – this piece was nearly 30 inches long and 25 inches in circumference. There it lay in front of him, defying all logic and reason. There was no way of proving to which set of teeth it belonged. Compared to a mammal bone, if scaled up in size his discovery would make a preposterous animal, far larger even than a house.

I may be accused of indulging in the marvellous, if I venture to state that upon comparing the larger bones of the Sussex lizard with those of the elephant, there seems reason to suppose that the former must have more than equalled the latter in bulk and have exceeded thirty feet in length! And yet some bones in my possession warrant such a conclusion … this species exceeded in magnitude every animal of the lizard tribe hitherto discovered, either in a recent or a fossilised state.

Could a heart really pump blood around a creature 30–40 feet long? Would muscles be strong enough to support such a heavy frame? What would it have eaten to keep its several tons of reptile flesh in pristine vigour? The creature beginning to emerge from his solitary work each night was hardly believable, a phantom from the underworld, yet there it was, solid as a rock, unassailable. As a glimpse of an ancient form of life it was tantalising; a seemingly endless, uncompletable, jigsaw. None of it added up to a whole animal, or even a coherent view of part of an animal. But with single-minded, purposeful dedication, Mantell continued to devote all his spare time to trying to solve the mystery. Everything in his life was sacrificed to this one bewitching interest. He would place the bones in history. He would be the man acclaimed.

But unknown to Gideon Mantell, he was not the only person in England in the early 1820s who had uncovered evidence that giant lizards once roamed the land.

3 Toast of Mice and Crocodiles for Tea (#ulink_feb507cd-56fc-50b8-9cfa-537cc6d7daeb)

Here we see the wrecks of beasts and fishes

With broken saucers, cups and dishes …

Skins wanting bones, bones wanting skins

And various blocks to break your shins.

No place in this for cutting capers,

Midst jumbled stones and books and papers,

Stuffed birds, portfolios, packing cases

And founders fallen upon their faces …

The sage amidst the chaos stands,

Contemplative with laden hands,

This, grasping tight his bread and butter

And that a flint, whilst he doth utter

Strange sentences that seem to say

‘I see it all as clear as day.’

‘A Picture of the Comforts of Professor

Buckland’s rooms in Christ Church,

Oxford’ by Philip Duncan, 1821, cited in

The Life and Correspondence of WilliamBuckland by Anna Gordon, 1894

In the heart of Oxford, under the watchful eye of the deans and canons at the university, the Reverend William Buckland’s enthusiasm for ‘undergroundology’ was beginning to attract wider support. As Reader in Mineralogy he had expanded the course to debate the latest geological ideas: whether the ‘days’ of Creation could correspond to lengthy ‘eras’; the nature of Noah’s Flood; the order of Creation. According to one reviewer, Buckland was so inspiring as a speaker that ‘he awakened in the University and elsewhere, an admiration and interest in Geology’. He told his friend the amateur geologist Lady Mary Cole that he had been lecturing to an ‘overflowing class … amongst whom I reckon the Bishop of Oxford, four other Heads of Colleges and three Canons of Christchurch’.

His idiosyncrasies were becoming almost as famous as his lectures and were accepted at the university as part of his brilliance. Anyone passing through the neatly trimmed rose gardens of the quad at Corpus Christi to Buckland’s rooms, expecting to find the usual happy amalgamation of elegance and learning fitting for a don, would soon discover that the professor had different priorities. ‘I can never forget the scene that awaited me on repairing from the Star Inn to Buckland’s domicile,’ recalled Roderick Murchison, an undergraduate at Oxford. ‘Having climbed up a narrow staircase … I entered a long corridor-like room filled with rocks, shells and bones in dire confusion. In a sort of sanctum at the end was my friend in his black gown, looking like a necromancer, sitting on a rickety chair covered with some fossils, clearing out a fossil bone from the matrix.’

In addition to fossils strewn liberally on almost every surface and the stuffed creatures in the hall, Professor Buckland was a keen naturalist and kept a number of unusual pets. There were cages full of snakes and green frogs in the dining-room, where the candles were placed in Ichthyosauri’s vertebrae. Guinea-pigs roamed freely throughout his office. Walter Stanhope, a tutor at Oxford, described an evening in Buckland’s apartments: ‘I took care to tuck up my legs on the sofa, for fear of a casual bite from a jackal that was wandering around the room. After a while I heard the animal munching up something under the sofa and was relieved that he should have found something to occupy him. I told Buckland. “My poor guinea pigs!” he exclaimed, and sure enough, four of the five of them had perished.’

By far the most splendid creature in Buckland’s menagerie was a bear, rather grandly named Tiglath Pileser, after the founder of the Assyrian Empire in the Old Testament Book of Kings. Unlike his namesake, who was renowned for his brutal punishment of his opponents, Tiglath the bear was ‘tame and caressing’. Buckland even went so far as to provide the bear with a student costume in which he participated fully in university life, especially the wine parties. ‘We had an immense party at the Botanic Gardens,’ Charles Lyell, one of Buckland’s undergraduates, recalled. ‘Young Buckland had a bear, “Tig” dressed up as a student complete with cap and gown.’ Tiglath Pileser was formally introduced to senior figures at the university. ‘It was diverting to see two or three of the dons not knowing what to do for fear their dignity was compromised.’

Most perplexing of all for visitors to Buckland’s apartments was the menu, since Buckland, a born experimentalist, had decided to eat his way through the animal kingdom as well as study it. ‘I recollect various queer dishes which he had at his table,’ recalled his friend John Playfair. ‘The hedgehog was a good experiment and both Liebig and I thought it good and tender. On another occasion I recollect a dish of crocodile, which was an utter failure … though the philosophers took one mouthful, they could not be persuaded to swallow it and rejected the morsel with strong language.’ John Ruskin, recalling his undergraduate days at Buckland’s table, wrote: ‘I met the leading scientific men of the day, from Herschel downwards … Everyone was at ease and amused at that breakfast table, the menu and the science of it, usually in themselves interesting. I have always regretted a day of unlucky engagement on which I missed a delicate toast of mice.’

The discussions that graced these gastronomic occasions were undoubtedly no less exotic. Buckland believed that geological history reflected a gradual preparation of the earth for Man’s habitation and was optimistic that a scientific history of the earth would tally with scriptural records. He was impressive in debate and was soon influencing some of the more liberal churchmen of his day. John Bird Sumner, the Bishop of Chester and later Archbishop of Canterbury, wrote a Treatise on the Records of Creation in 1816, in which he supported Buckland and other members of the Geological Society in viewing the six ‘days’ as six creative ‘eras’.

Buckland’s keenness to reconcile the new science with religion won him support in high places. As his reputation grew, he made the acquaintance of leading gentlemen of the day, including Lord Grenville, the Chancellor of Oxford University; Sir Joseph Banks, the famous botanist; and Sir Everard Home at the Royal Society, as well as leading politicians such as Robert Peel. Using these powerful contacts, Buckland lobbied for the first chair of geology to be created at Oxford. He reassured Lord Grenville that the sciences would, of course, be subordinate to the classics. ‘I would not surrender a single particle of our system of classical study,’ he promised. The matter was referred to the highest level of government, eventually reaching His Royal Highness, the Prince Regent.

In 1818, with the approval of His Royal Highness, the stipend for a Professor of Geology at Oxford was allotted from the Treasury. ‘I feel quite proud of the high consideration which is given to the noble subterranean science by such exalted personages,’ Buckland told Lady Mary Cole at Penrice Castle. However, such approval from leading members of society added to the pressure on Buckland to satisfy the urgent need to find geological evidence that would corroborate the Scriptures, such as a biblical Flood. The religious tradition was so entrenched at Oxford that if geologists could not discover such evidence quickly, the infant science would lack credibility.

When Buckland became Reader in Geology he also became Director of the Ashmolean Museum. Directly under his supervision in this museum, on display in the heart of Oxford for well over a century, were the bones of an unknown giant animal. As early as 1677 the first Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum, a Dr Robert Plot, had described them. While writing a Natural History of Oxfordshire, Dr Plot had come across an inexplicably large portion of thigh bone from a local quarry, weighing more than twenty pounds. He had suspected it was the bone of an elephant brought to England during the Roman invasion of Britain. When later he had an opportunity to study the skeleton of an elephant, he was puzzled to find that the huge Oxford fossil was totally different. There seemed only one conclusion to be drawn. He wrote, the fossil ‘has exactly the figure of the lower most part of the Thigh-bone of a Man’.

During the eighteenth century, more giant bones had been discovered in quarries around Oxford. Joshua Platt, a ‘Curiosity-Monger’, found three large vertebrae buried at Stonesfield, near Woodstock. Later, the same dealer reported part of a giant thigh bone almost thirty inches long which he valued at four shillings, and a fragment of scapula, or shoulder bone. Early in the next century Professor Kidd, Buckland’s predecessor as Reader of Mineralogy, had studied the bones and concluded they were derived from some strange mammal. William Buckland did not record any conclusions about the unknown creature in 1818 when he became the Keeper of the museum, although it is likely that people looked to him for an opinion. Impossible to classify and the subject of the wildest speculation, the bones were at once familiar and accepted as everyday objects and at the same time represented a past of incomprehensible strangeness.

However, later that year there was an opportunity for Buckland to extend his unique brand of English hospitality to a very distinguished French visitor: Georges Cuvier. Cuvier was updating his extensive survey of fossils, Recherches sur les Ossemens Fossiles, and hoped to see the latest discoveries of giant bones in Oxford. By now, he had almost legendary status throughout Europe. Approaching his fifties, his thick red hair long since dulled, the ‘Napoleon of Intelligence’ made a powerful impression and the self-confidence amassed from a lifetime of invariably being ‘right’ was palpable. It was said of Cuvier that his library – containing some nineteen thousand volumes – was so familiar to him that he could remember everything and retrieve any volume or monograph he required in seconds. He had been showered with awards, named Councillor of State in 1813, and was later granted the honorary title of Baron.

Cuvier visited the Ashmolean and was presented with a variety of giant bones: teeth, vertebrae, ribs, part of an enormous thigh bone and confusing fragments of other bones. No two bones, except for some of the vertebrae, had been found connected together. It was impossible to tell from the detached bones whether they originated from different animals of various ages and sizes or belonged to the same creature. Although there are no records of the conversation that took place between Cuvier and Buckland in 1818, subsequent letters between the two reveal that in no time Cuvier had solved the puzzle.

The first clue available to him came from the rocks themselves. The bones from Stonesfield were found in rock at a considerable depth below the surface. The stone was being mined to provide roofs for new buildings, and could only be obtained by going deep underground. ‘They descend by vertical shafts through a solid rock … more than 40 feet thick, to the slaty stratum containing these remains,’ wrote William Buckland. The giant bones ‘are not lodged in fissures and cavities but are absolutely imbedded in a deeply situated stratum … which extends across England from near Stamford in Lincolnshire to Hinton near Bath’.

Buckland had studied these rocks and confirmed the earlier work of the surveyor William Smith that the Stonesfield slate lay immediately above a stratum known in the geological sequence as ‘the oolitic limestone’ of Bath. The oolitic limestone was correctly seen as ancient, formed at the same time as the ‘Jura [Jurassic] limestone’ strata found on the Continent, well below the chalk in the Secondary series. No mammals had been found this far back in the geological sequence; Cuvier’s large mammals were found in the more recent, Tertiary formations. So although the thigh bone had mammalian characteristics, with a thickset, straight vertical shaft, Cuvier examined the bones confident that they were far more likely to be from a reptile than a mammal.

Unlike Gideon Mantell’s discoveries in Sussex, the huge teeth displayed at the Ashmolean were still attached to the jaw, and this too provided several important clues. Although the holes for the teeth varied in size along the length of the jaw, they were all the same shape, typical of a reptile. Tiny pointed teeth were poking through the jaw beside the adult teeth which, since reptiles have replacement teeth growing through the jaw all their lives, also indicated that the jaw belonged to a reptile. ‘The exuberant provision in this creature,’ Buckland wrote, ‘for a rapid succession of young teeth to supply the place of those which might be shed or broken is very remarkable.’ Convinced the bones belonged to a reptile, both from the age of the rocks and the characteristics of the jaw, Cuvier could pronounce with some certainty that it had other reptilian characteristics: it had been oviparous, or egg-laying and had a dry, scaly skin.

But it was much harder to define what kind of reptile or lizard it might have been. Cuvier could see that, within the reptile class, it was not like a turtle, because there was no shell and it lacked the distinctive shape of skull and form of vertebrae. The largest reptile known at this time was a crocodile. These bones shared some features in common with crocodiles: the double-headed ribs, the vertebrae with flat articulating surfaces; and the giant thigh bone had a fourth trochanter, an extra surface for muscle attachment. Mammals have only three surfaces for muscle attachment at the top of the thigh bone; crocodiles, like the unknown creature, have four, denoting a tremendous muscle structure. However, there the similarity ended.

Unlike the conical ridged teeth of the crocodile, these teeth were compressed, with a long serrated edge along the whole extent of the enamel, like a steak knife. The exterior surface of the jaw had distinct cavities for the passage of blood vessels and nerves, allowing the creature a very good blood supply to support the activity of the jaw. And whereas a crocodile jaw is long, thin and pointed, this fragment of lower jaw was short, high and narrow, flattened from side to side. From the absence of curvature on any piece of the lower jawbone, nearly a foot in length, it seemed likely that this creature’s jaw terminated in a flat, straight, and very narrow snout. Cuvier concluded that of all living animals, these bones were most similar to a carnivorous lizard known as the monitor lizard. However, there was one crucial difference: size. Comparing the thigh bone, which was ten inches in circumference, to the equivalent bone in a lizard, he simply scaled up. ‘From these dimensions,’ wrote Buckland, ‘a length exceeding 40 feet and a bulk equal to that of an elephant seven feet high, have been assigned by Cuvier to the individual to which this bone belonged … we may with certainty ascribe to it a magnitude very far exceeding that of any living lizard.’

Although the archives suggest that Buckland had accumulated all this information from his meeting in 1818 with Georges Cuvier and subsequent correspondence, he was in no hurry to publish the findings. His reluctance to announce the find may simply have reflected a reasonable scientific caution. Unlike the ichthyosaurs that Mary Anning had found at Lyme, the Stonesfield animal was far from complete. But Buckland was also well aware that the Anglican authorities who had helped him obtain his stipend as professor from the Treasury were hoping that he would reconcile any geological discoveries with the Bible. A forty-foot reptile was hardly the ideal candidate. After all, there was no record of such a fantastic, almost mythical creature in Moses’ account of Creation.

Rather than devoting his time to combing the quarries for further evidence of his huge reptile, Buckland set his sights on another quest altogether: to discover proof of the biblical Flood. In 1819 he presented his inaugural address in geology at Oxford, ‘Vindiciae Geologicae, or The Connexion between Geology and Religion explained’. With great deference to the classical tradition, he explained why ‘no evil should be anticipated’ if geology was permitted to serve as ‘the handmaid of Religion’. He reassured the bishops and deans in the audience that there would be no opposition between the ‘Works’ and the ‘Word’ of God. There was no mention of the giant beast of Stonesfield; instead, Buckland expressed his conviction that the new science was bound to provide evidence of the recent origin of Man and the Great Flood.

By 1819, Buckland thought he had convincing evidence for the Deluge. Accompanied by his friend the geological enthusiast Count Breunner of Vienna, he studied the distribution of quartz pebbles and gravels across England. They traced these gravels ‘over the plains of Warwickshire, the Midlands, on some hills in Oxfordshire and in the valley of the Thames … to below London’. Later that autumn, Buckland wrote a paper for the Geological Society on ‘the evidences of the Recent Deluge’, in which he proposed that the fearsome torrents of ‘the first rush of the advancing deluge’ had swept these gravels across southern England. They had, he thought, retraced the actual path of the Flood.

The nearest source to which the Reverend Buckland and the Count could trace the pebbles was Lickey Hill in Worcestershire: ‘they present the same glassy brilliancy of fracture … the same small crystals of decomposing felspar throughout’. Consequently they believed the pebbles had originated from Worcestershire and had been ‘torn up by the waters of the last Deluge’. As the Flood subsided, ‘the weight and force of the immense volume of water … excavated the series of sweeping combs and valleys’, seen for example from Bath to Stow-on-the-Wold. Although Buckland could find no geological evidence to explain what prompted the Deluge and could not define the dimensions of the tidal wave, he was in no doubt that a giant surge or tidal wave had once occurred.

In pursuing evidence for a Flood, Buckland was hoping to resolve philosophical issues that lay at the heart of geology. This would not only add credibility to the new science but could also shed light on what happened to the ‘former worlds’ uncovered by geologists. There was, as yet, no framework within which creatures such as the Ichthyosaurus or the strange reptile from Stonesfield could be understood. Where did these beasts come from and, above all, what had happened to them? Why had God erased these creatures from the face of the earth? In England, where the Anglican faith dominated academic centres like Oxford, the best clue to extinction was the biblical Flood. But in France, naturalists were beginning to put forward new ideas.

Since the discovery that mammalian species such as the mammoth and the mastodon had disappeared from the earth’s surface, the puzzle of extinction had been keenly debated in Paris at the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle. Georges Cuvier and a senior colleague at the museum, the ‘Professor of Insects and Worms’ Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, had developed radically opposing theories. According to Lamarck, species were not necessarily extinct at all. They had developed by ‘transmutation’ into other forms of life.

Lamarck’s thinking stemmed from eighteenth-century beliefs that all living things were linked by imperceptible transitions; Nature was a continuous ‘Chain of Being’. The simplest organisms on the scale were those that maintained the minimum conditions for life, and Man, the supreme form, was at the top of the hierarchy. The great Chain of Being was an attempt to explain the incredible diversity of living forms in the absence of any chronology showing the order in which animals appeared on the earth. Lamarck believed that as organisms in this ‘scale of being’ strove for perfection they could transform themselves while adapting to their environment. Changing circumstances led to new responses from animals, which eventually became habitual. Organs could change permanently by frequent use or habits, allowing for the progression of animal forms into ever more complex types, without any special creation from God. This is what he meant by the ‘transmutation’ of species. In his Philosophie Zoologique published in 1809 he outlined a thesis in which humble creatures could ‘generate’ into higher forms of life.

Lamarck had little evidence to back up his ideas; the fossil record at the beginning of the nineteenth century was so incomplete that there was no proof of the progression of life over time. From his studies on fossil invertebrates, he could only show that the fossil molluscs such as ammonites and belemnites found in ancient Secondary rock were very different from living species. Neither did he propose a convincing mechanism to demonstrate how evolution might have occurred. Nonetheless, in his lectures he described the invertebrates as the most primitive forms of life and, he speculated, ‘perhaps the ones with which Nature began, while it formed all the others with the help of much time and of favourable circumstances’. His ideas on development implied that no species became extinct – they were merely transformed: ‘one may not assume,’ he wrote in 1802, ‘that any species has really been lost or rendered extinct’.