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

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck’s revolutionary thinking had worrying implications. Could intelligence and rational thought, the ‘God-given’ attributes which set Man apart from animals, have developed from more primitive forms of life? If organisms transformed themselves and higher forms could emerge from lower forms, then Man was not specially made by God. Buckland’s friend Conybeare was one of many to denounce Lamarck’s ‘ridiculous’ theory. It was ‘an idea so monstrous’, Conybeare told the Geological Society in 1821, ‘that nothing less than the credulity of a material philosophy could have been brought for a single moment to entertain it, nothing less than its bigotry to defend it’. The idea that Nature was autonomous and could randomly generate higher forms of existence, including Man, was greeted with intense hostility and roundly condemned.

In France, Lamarck had difficulty even in obtaining publishers for his ideas. Cuvier was so antagonistic to this ‘evolutionary’ thinking, it is thought that he advised the Emperor Napoleon not to accept a copy of Lamarck’s Philosophie Zoologique. It was a well-orchestrated public humiliation. In his lectures, Cuvier scoffed at the notion that organs could be formed by frequent use. He challenged Lamarck’s view that the entire animal kingdom was united in one genealogical tree. Cuvier believed that the differences between, for example, a humble mollusc and a complex vertebrate were so great that they could not possibly have arisen from a continuous chain.

Cuvier had developed a different theory to account for extinction, called the ‘Doctrine of Catastrophes’, according to which violent ‘revolutions’ had wiped away former worlds, destroying ancient forms of life. These ideas stemmed from a study he had undertaken with another colleague at the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, the Professor of Mineralogy Alexandre Brongniart. Together they made a special study of the conditions under which fossils had become entombed in the Tertiary rocks of the Paris basin. For four years, almost every week, they took the carriage into the countryside around the River Seine.

Above the chalk of the Secondary strata they identified several major Tertiary formations. Each layer of rock had its own characteristic fossils, some containing marine invertebrates, others only freshwater creatures. These alternating layers of marine and freshwater formations led the two scientists to conclude that there had been repeated incursions of sea. Because there were ‘abrupt junctions’ between the marine and freshwater formations, they reasoned, the ocean had invaded suddenly, submerging the land for prolonged periods and destroying living species.

The ancient globe, Cuvier reasoned in his Essay on the Theory of the Earth, was punctuated by a series of ‘revolutions that were so stupendous that … the thread of Nature’s operations was broken by them and her progress altered’. He envisaged that prior to the creation of Man there were several different periods in the earth’s history, shown by the many different layers of rock in the earth’s crust that were filled with fossils. Each period ended in a dramatic geological ‘catastrophe’ in which species became extinct. ‘Life has often been disturbed on this earth by terrible events,’ wrote Cuvier. ‘Numberless living beings have been the victims of these catastrophes; their races have even become extinct.’

When Cuvier’s Essay was translated into English, the editor, Professor Robert Jameson of Edinburgh University, presented Cuvier’s theory as though the most recent ‘catastrophe’ was the biblical Flood. This was an obvious mistranslation of the Frenchman’s original ideas, which were based upon research within the Paris basin. Nevertheless, in England this was embraced as authoritative scientific backing for the Bible. William Buckland praised Cuvier’s ‘inestimable Essay’, and was eager to extend his notion of incursions of sea to ‘a recent Deluge acting universally over the surface of the whole globe’. He also hoped to show how this might correspond with the layers of rock that formed the earth’s crust.

By 1821, Buckland and his friends at the Geological Society had made considerable progress mapping the succession of strata in England. Following William Smith’s earlier studies, they identified several major formations in the Secondary series, complementing Cuvier’s studies of the Tertiary rock above. There was still little known about the oldest Primary and Transition layers. Nonetheless, Buckland and his colleagues had glimpsed as far back in time as the period now known as ‘Devonian’, the lowermost Secondary rocks. They called these ancient rocks the ‘Old Red Sandstone’. Above this, Buckland identified later rock formations: ‘Carboniferous Limestone’, succeeded by the ‘Coal Measures’, ‘New Red Sandstone’ (Triassic), ‘Jura limestone’ (Jurassic), and finally the most recent chalk and greensand (Cretaceous). These formations together made up the major periods of the Secondary series. Sadly for William Smith, when the gentlemen geologists of the Geological Society of London published their map, sales of his own map were cut to nothing. Smith became so poor that at one stage he was even reduced to spending time in a debtors’ prison.

Although little was known about the fossils in the different layers, this classification of the Secondary rocks proved to be remarkably accurate and still stands up to scrutiny today. Since, as James Hutton had argued, each layer of rock was formed imperceptibly, the result of gradual erosion and deposition over countless years, this classification lent powerful support to the idea of vast geological epochs before the creation of Man. Buckland was beginning to glimpse distinct periods in which centuries of prehistory buried in the earth’s crust could be defined.

Buckland was keen to integrate all these threads of evidence: the succession of strata, Cuvier’s ‘catastrophes’ and biblical records of a Flood. His opportunity came later in 1821, when quarrymen stumbled upon a cave at Kirkdale in Yorkshire containing ancient fossil bones. He hurried to the site, suspecting this would provide further insights. Surely the animals in the cave had been swept in by the terrifying, swirling Flood waters? What he found was stranger than anything he could have imagined.

Deep into the cave he went, on his hands and knees, the circle of light from a candle allowing him brief glimpses of what lay ahead, the voices of his companions echoing in the ancient silence. Undisturbed for centuries, the cave divided into passages that stretched back two hundred feet into the hillside. At first, all he could see was mud and silt. Gradually, it became clear that the scene was much more gruesome. Partially obscured by stalagmites and stalactites, ‘the bottom of the cave was strewed all over, from one end to the other, with hundreds of teeth and bones’. ‘Scarcely a single bone has escaped fracture,’ he said.

Drawings of the fossils were sent to Georges Cuvier, who confirmed Buckland’s suspicions that the bones were from many different animals jumbled together in disarray. These were creatures that never live together: tigers and deer, bears and horses, in addition to extinct species of elephant, rhinoceros, hippopotamus and hyenas. Furthermore, it was hard to envisage how large animals such as elephants could have passed through the two-foot entrance to the cave. Even more puzzling, Buckland observed from the splintered fragments and gnaw marks, all the bones appeared to have been half-eaten.

Buckland began to suspect that this was an ancient hyena den; the larger animals had been dragged into the cavern, a portion of the carcass at a time. He imported a hyena from the Cape and compared the gnaw marks on bones eaten by it with those from the caves. He soon wrote jubilantly to a friend, the Reverend Vernon Harcourt: ‘Billy [the hyena] has performed admirably on shins of beef, leaving precisely those parts which are left at Kirkdale and devouring what are there wanting … So wonderfully alike were these bones in their fracture … that it is impossible to say which bone had been cracked by Billy and which by the hyenas of Kirkdale!’

Buckland gathered more than three hundred hyena canine teeth from the cavern, and the bones of over seventy-five hyenas. Comparing these to skeletons of living species, Cuvier showed ‘that the fossil hyena was nearly one third larger than the largest of modern species. Its muzzle was shorter and stronger … and its bite more powerful.’ Since it was a species of hyena from genera that now only inhabit the tropics, Buckland reasoned that there had once been a tropical climate in Northern Europe. His interpretation of the cave as an ancient hyena den has proved correct, and when he presented his ideas to the Royal Society they were so well received that he was honoured with the Society’s prestigious Copley medal, never before given to a geologist.

Buckland told the Royal Society that the hyenas thrived in the ‘Ante-diluvian period, immediately preceding the Deluge’, and speculated that the extinct species in the cave were destroyed during the biblical Flood. These conclusions were based on the supposition that there were no human records of the species living in Europe since the Flood. As the bones were so well preserved in mud and silt he maintained the animals had been destroyed suddenly, and from the quantity of stalagmite in the cave above the mud he estimated that the inundation occurred six thousand years ago. In 1823, Buckland published a full-scale treatise, the ‘Reliquiae Diluvianae, or Relics of the Deluge’, in which he tried to fit this cave study and his earlier work on gravels with Cuvier’s most recent ‘catastrophe’.

Cuvier’s studies in the Paris basin had suggested that during each local catastrophe the land and the sea had changed places; this was reflected in alternating layers of marine and land strata. Buckland maintained that since the Yorkshire cave was inhabited by hyenas before the catastrophe that destroyed them, the area was land both before and after the Flood. The Flood, he reasoned, had been a transitory event during which the land remained in the same position. This lent weight to his view that any Flood should be viewed as a surge or tidal wave rather than a prolonged event. He also tried to show that the Flood had covered the whole globe. The fossils retrieved from the caves were identical to fossils found in loam and gravel deposits all over Europe, and so Buckland speculated that the same catastrophic event had destroyed the animals in the cave and swept the gravels to their positions. The gravel deposits were found in similar circumstances all over Europe, including hill sites, ‘to which no rivers could ever have drifted them’.

Although Reliquiae Diluvianae was immensely popular and sold out almost immediately, it unleashed a storm of comments from literalist theologians who believed in sticking to the letter of the Bible and disliked any conclusion that appeared to reduce the power of the Deluge. Rather than the caves being hyena dens, argued the Reverend George Young, a minister from Yorkshire, the awesome violence of the Flood had torn animals apart, limb from limb, forcing the confused debris of many of them into fissures in rocks and caves. The fractures and ‘bite-marks’ were not due to their having been eaten, but rather, testimony to the ‘wild confusion’ of the torrent in which the creatures were tossed and mangled. Others too, disputed that tropical animals had once lived in England. Tropical beasts were found in Yorkshire because the mighty currents had swept them thousands of miles. ‘Can we conclude with geologists that England must once have been inhabited by tropical animals merely because their remains are now found there, in a scattered and broken state?’ protested the theologian George Fairholme. ‘Had this not been the hypothesis of some of our ablest geologists it would have been termed the result of the most inconsiderate ignorance!’

As a backlash developed in response to Buckland’s interpretation of the Flood, other theological scholars challenged the idea that the Flood affected only the surface of the globe. In Moses’ account, ‘all the fountains of the deep’ were opened and the earth’s crust was totally destroyed by a mighty, raging torrent. According to Buckland, the Flood was a rather more modest affair, merely confined to shifting the superficial gravels. It wasn’t long before literalists objected to Buckland’s fundamental premise that geological epochs of immense duration had occurred before the Flood.

Layers of rock thousands of feet thick were demolished during the Deluge, according to the biblical scholar George Cumberland. ‘The fountains of waters contained in the great depths of the earth were broken up,’ he said. ‘Universal subsidence must have taken place. The operation must have been pretty rapid and immense layers of strata must have formed, filled up with the debris of the broken surface.’ Far from strata forming almost imperceptibly over countless years, there was a ‘sudden production of a thick sequence of rock!’ he claimed. ‘Such a world as ours might very well come forth in all its finished beauty instantaneously.’ The Reverend Young even produced an estimate of the speed of formation of the earth’s crust: ‘Provided there are currents to supply the materials, strata can form at a rate of nine hundred feet in a month!’ he declared.

George Fairholme captured the sense of outrage at the insolent new science that dared to challenge biblical records: ‘It is not unknown what ungodly avidity is exhibited by infidel philosophers … to distort every fact of science into a sophism against the Scriptures of eternal truth. Of these open scoffers … we have no dread; for the Bible has nothing to lose by being tried, like gold in the hottest crucible,’ he preached. ‘The gates of Hell itself cannot prevail against the word of God.’

William Buckland, with his blustering self-confidence and tremendous enthusiasm for his ‘noble subterranean science’, tried, as usual, to steer a path through these obstacles. But even his colleagues at the Geological Society questioned some of his evidence. How could he assume that the Flood was global, when gravels were found only in northern latitudes? The more the Reverend Buckland struggled to fit the findings of geology with the Bible, the more anomalies seemed to arise. Was Noah’s Flood transient or prolonged, global or local? Did the waters destroy only superficial layers or the entire earth’s crust? Were animals made extinct in one biblical Flood, or in a series of Cuvierian ‘catastrophes’? Or even, as Lamarck proposed, were species not truly extinct at all, merely transmuted into other creatures?

With some justification, one Scottish minister, John Flemming, summed up the confusion in a paper in the Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal: ‘The Geological Deluge, as interpreted by Baron Cuvier and Professor Buckland, [is] inconsistent with the testimony of Moses and the Phenomena of Nature.’ In Oxford, Buckland’s dilemmas were immortalised in a popular satire, Facetiae Diluvianae, in which Buckland met the great prophet Noah and each added to the bewilderment of the other.

Caught up in the storm at the birth of the new science, it is hardly surprising that the beleaguered Professor Buckland failed to announce the improbable discovery of a forty-foot reptile. However, Georges Cuvier in Paris was getting impatient since he wished to incorporate the information on the Stonesfield reptile in the updated volumes of his Recherches sur les Ossemens Fossiles. In September 1820, his assistant Joseph Pentland wrote to Buckland from the Muséum National in Paris: ‘Will you send your Stonesfield reptile, or will you publish it yourself?’ Deeply immersed in controversy, Buckland hesitated. A year later, the Reverend Conybeare also referred to the giant carnivorous lizard of Stonesfield in his paper on the Ichthyosaurus, adding ‘it is hoped [that Buckland] may soon communicate the results of his observations to the public’. But he did not. Soon, Pentland wrote once more, urging Buckland to announce the details of his research. Yet again, Buckland did nothing.

Thus the enormous bones continued to lie in the Ashmolean Museum, carefully prepared and neatly displayed behind the glass cages, an unexplained curiosity. They had become almost invisible by long acceptance, for over a century part of the paraphernalia of the museum alongside the stuffed animals and other objects. For the time being, in Oxford, the question mark they posed over the nature of giant reptilian beasts that had once lived on land was carefully and assiduously not seen.

4 The Subterranean Forest (#ulink_880edba7-6826-5bf1-b80c-1dfb541b0374)

To see a World in a Grain of Sand

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand,

And Eternity in an hour.

William Blake, ‘Auguries of Innocence’

While William Buckland was preoccupied with grand theories and finding little time to investigate the giant reptile of Stonesfield, Gideon Mantell was rapidly becoming obsessed with the strange fossils emerging from the Weald in Sussex. As he began to prepare his first book, Fossils of the South Downs, during the late autumn of 1821, he wrote, with some excitement, that ‘the relics of a former creation’ that he had uncovered were as ‘extraordinary as any hitherto recorded’.

Everything about this secret, hidden world, buried beneath the Sussex landscape, seemed bizarre and unpredictable. One persistent puzzle was why the bones of large reptilian creatures should be found with fragments of tropical vegetation. After his first discovery in 1820 of what appeared to be an ancient ‘palm’ entombed in the quarries at Whiteman’s Green, Gideon Mantell tried to find out about tropical botany through his contact Charles Konig, at the British Museum.

Tropical plants had been known in Britain since Captain Cook, having discovered the east coast of Australia, Java, and Easter Island, returned from his voyage on the Endeavour in 1771. Accompanied by the botanist Joseph Banks, Cook had brought back hundreds of specimens that he had donated to the British Museum. Banks had later persuaded George III to turn Kew Gardens into a botanical research centre, displaying plants from all over the world. From these eighteenth-century explorations the English horticulturalists began to learn more about the hot, wet ecosystems, unmarked by seasons, within which these plants flourished.

Gideon Mantell set about tracing specialist sources of living tropical plants in order to compare the fossils he uncovered. He was ‘much pleased’ with ‘the unrivalled collection of living palms of Messrs Loddiges of Hackney’, one of the few palm merchants in Georgian Britain. As news of Mantell’s curious finds spread, local people, too, provided unexpected help, such as: ‘the Honourable Mrs Thomas of Ratton, Eastbourne, who presented interesting specimens of the trunks of fossil palms from Antigua’. From these comparisons, Mantell deduced that several of the fossil stems and trunks he was uncovering with the giant animal bones were from ancient tree-ferns. ‘The surface of these fossils is rough, the trunk is nearly cylindrical … They resemble species of arborescent fern, perhaps Dicksonia?’ he speculated. Dicksonia is a contemporary tree-fern that can reach a large size, with a slender stem and huge fronds. Mantell sent fossils to Konig at the British Museum, who confirmed his suspicions: ‘Some tree ferns are very like this with regard to the lozenge-shaped bases of the fronds,’ he replied.

The largest fossil trunk in Mantell’s collection was fourteen inches in circumference and four feet in length. From the thickness of this trunk and the rudimentary branches it looked as if it had once extended a great deal further and was part of something tall and tree-like, not a little shrub. Mantell compared the measurements of this trunk to those of tree-ferns in New South Wales, which could grow to thirty feet with stems of only a foot in diameter. ‘From the imperfect state in which these [fossils] occur it is evident that the originals attained a very large size,’ he wrote incredulously. Huge tropical plants alongside huge reptilian animals: it was barely believable.

Yet each trip to Loddiges’ Greenhouses provided more evidence. Mantell soon identified cycads: ‘the impressions of the leaf stalks on the bark bear a great resemblance to those on the stems of Cycas revoluta,’ he wrote. Cycads look similar to short palms, the trunk covered with the woody bases of leaf stalks and bearing a big crown of leaves at the top. There were also fragments of unknown foliage, heavily blackened with charcoal and quite unlike anything in Loddiges’ Greenhouses. ‘These specimens are so entirely distinct from any that are known to exist in European countries that we seek in vain for anything analogous,’ Mantell observed. Many of the fossils he uncovered are now known to have been Bennettitales, an extinct group of cycad-like plants once dominant in the ancient Weald.

Concealed with this buried tropical forest were the remains of aquatic invertebrates. From his early studies on the Downs, Gideon Mantell was an expert on the marine invertebrates of the chalk deposits. The invertebrates of the Weald were different. He could not see the familiar whorls of the ammonite or snake-stone, of belemnites, nautilus or other shelled creatures which once swarmed in the primitive seas that formed the chalk. Instead there were the casts of shells that he did not recognise; impressions sometimes so faint that they left just the barest trace of their external forms: the hinge of two joined shells, as in certain types of clam and pearl mussel, or the fragmentary pieces of a species of snail, perhaps. It was indeed tantalising; fragments both familiar and unfamiliar, never quite forming a complete fossil or displaying a clear marking. Uncertain what they could be, Mantell wrote to his usual correspondents such as James Sowerby, an expert on fossil shells, hoping he would shed more light on these invertebrates.

As for the massive animal bones that were scattered among the debris of this tropical forest, they remained indecipherable; an ancient hieroglyphic for which he did not have the code. He was increasingly certain that many of the bones, such as the giant thigh bone, did not match those of the sea lizards. They were far too chunky and solid. Although some of the bones were rather like those of ancient crocodiles, he had two sets of very large teeth that were not: the worn teeth of a herbivore and the blade-like teeth of a carnivore. ‘Of the numerous specimens in my collection not one is perfect; by far the greater part consisting of fragments rounded by the action of water and deprived of the anatomical distinctions so necessary to the elucidation of the form of the original,’ he wrote, utterly baffled by these remnants of a ‘former creation’.

His investigations were becoming so compelling that other aspects of his life paled by comparison. ‘Murdered two evenings at cards,’ he complained in his diary. Whether attending the local sheep fair or the ever-popular Brighton races, as a doctor he had a position to maintain in the heart of the community. In provincial society it wouldn’t do to appear hurried, or unavailable. But each night when his duties were done he would pore over the details of the animal bones and tropical vegetation, trying to make sense of the wild profusion of relics from this ancient time.

On the evening of 4 October 1821, an unexpected visitor arrived at Castle Place who was able to help him. Mantell was summoned downstairs to meet a young man who ‘presents nothing remarkable, except a broad expanse of forehead,’ he wrote. ‘He is of the middle size … small eyes, fine chin and a rather reserved expression of countenance.’ The stranger introduced himself as Charles Lyell. Lyell had been visiting his former school in Midhurst, Sussex, when quarrymen had told him of a ‘monstrous clever mon, as lived in Lewes … who got curiosities out of the chalk-pits to make physic with’. The quarrymen were Mantell’s labourers, and Lyell was so intrigued by their account that he rode for twenty-five miles across the Downs to track the man down.

It was soon apparent that Lyell and Mantell had a great deal in common. ‘Mr Lyell is enthusiastically devoted to geology,’ Mantell entered in his diary; ‘he drank tea with us and we sat chatting on geological matters till now – midnight’. Lyell’s interest in geology had started while at Oxford University. Although studying classics, he had been drawn to Buckland’s inaugural lectures in which the professor was at his most electrifying. Lyell’s father had written to a friend, ‘Buckland’s lectures are engaging [my son] heart and soul at present.’ Afterwards, in keeping with his position as the eldest son of minor gentry, Lyell had embarked on a career in law in London, but his eyes gave him trouble. Eventually, his father had indulged his interest in science and taken him to Europe. During one carriage tour across the Alps, Lyell had studied the effects of glaciers on the landscape; on a second trip, he had observed the effect of rivers in forming a coastal plain on the Adriatic coast of Italy.

Since his family was wealthy, with a large estate in Scotland, Lyell had an independent income and more leisure for geology than Mantell. The following day, while Mantell was visiting patients, he went to explore the Sussex strata and then returned to Castle Place: ‘to have tea at six o’clock,’ Mantell wrote. ‘My few drawers of fossils were soon looked over, but we were in gossip until morning.’ The visit marked the beginning of an enduring friendship between these two men, both hoping to make a career from geology.

Although there is no record of their conversation over these two days, there is evidence that Lyell told Mantell of Buckland’s giant reptile in the Ashmolean Museum and they compared the Stonesfield fossils in Oxfordshire with those of Cuckfield in Sussex. Fired by these discussions, soon after leaving, Lyell lost no time in visiting Stonesfield to obtain a boxful of fossils that he despatched to the Lewes wagon office. Three weeks later, on 25 October 1821, Mantell wrote in his diary: ‘received an interesting collection of Stonesfield fossils from Mr Lyell; in many respects they resemble those of Cuckfield’.

Charles Lyell’s news of the huge reptilian bones in Oxford confirmed for Mantell that his fossils were not just of provincial interest. He learned not only that Georges Cuvier had concluded that the Stonesfield beast was a reptile, but also that it was at least forty feet long and as bulky as an elephant. Armed with this information, Mantell felt that his own speculations of giant lizards buried in the Weald did not seem quite so preposterous. He could now attempt to classify his own fossils by seeing which bore most resemblance to the giant Oxford lizard.

About this time, Mantell almost certainly heard from Lyell of William Buckland’s intention to publish a detailed paper on the Stonesfield reptile. Since Buckland, the famous Regis Professor, was planning to describe and name the new carnivorous lizard, it was hardly appropriate for the unknown Mantell to claim this opportunity for himself. However, no one had reported anything like the unidentified herbivorous teeth. Mantell felt, therefore, that he could be the first to identify this animal, new to science, and claim the recognition, without interfering in Buckland’s study.

Patiently taking advantage of any introduction he could negotiate, Gideon Mantell sent a prospectus of his planned book on the geology of Sussex to members of the landed gentry, inviting them to subscribe for copies. The Earl of Chichester, the Bishop of Durham, the Earl of Egremont and numerous others replied; in all he attracted two hundred subscribers. Better still, in 1821 an envelope arrived from Carlton House Palace. Mantell broke the royal seal, and read: ‘His Majesty is pleased to command that his name should be placed at the head of the subscription list for four copies.’ Quite how George IV had heard of the book is unclear; Mantell wrote back simply, ‘I am indebted to J. Martin Cripps Esquire for this honour.’ But there can be no doubt of Mantell’s response: the royal encouragement was, he said, ‘most gratifying to my feelings’. He had great expectations now that his book would place him ‘in the first circles’ and allow him some means of devoting more time to geology. The carelessly rich could so easily liberate him from his unrelenting daily round of chores.

Fossils of the South Downs, published in May 1822, reveals the progress Gideon Mantell had made in interpreting the strange fossils buried in the Weald. In the preface he pointed out ‘that his labours were snatched from hours of repose … a record made under circumstances unfavourable to literary pursuits’, and he even apologised for the quality of his wife’s drawings. ‘As the engravings are the first performances of a lady but little skilled in the art, I am most anxious to claim for them every indulgence … although they may be destitute of that neatness and uniformity which distinguish the works of the professed artist, they will not, I trust be found deficient in the more essential requisite of correctness.’

Gideon Mantell began by classifying the strata of Sussex. The lowermost and oldest Secondary rock he identified as the ‘Iron Sand’. Above this in order of succession he placed the limestone, sandstone and slate where he had found the giant bones, calling this the ‘Tilgate Beds’ named after the Tilgate Forest. This was followed by Weald clay, greensand and several chalk formations. On top of these Secondary layers came the more recent Tertiary formations such as London clay. He described many of the fossils he had found in the chalk. At a time when palaeoichthyology, the study of fossil fish, was unknown, Mantell had collected superb fish specimens. He also classified fossil invertebrates of the chalk and named more than sixty new species, including different types of ammonites, zoophytes, echinites, univalves and bivalves.

With some understatement that belied the months of feverish excitement, Gideon Mantell stated that the Tilgate beds in the Weald were ‘one of the most important series of deposits’ that he had uncovered. He attempted to catalogue the extraordinary fossils of the giant bones. Under the heading ‘Fossil Lacertae [Lizards]’ he wrote: ‘the teeth, vertebrae, bones and other remains of an animal of the Lizard Tribe of enormous magnitude are perhaps the most interesting fossils that have been discovered in the County of Sussex’. He described the characteristics of the sharp, curved carnivorous teeth and provided measurements of fragments of vertebrae and ribs, which were, he said, ‘decidedly analogous to those of the Lizard Tribe’. Other bones were also listed: the head of the radius (forearm), metacarpals (bones of the hand) and a thigh bone. ‘Some fragments of a cylindrical bone, probably the femur, indicate an animal of gigantic magnitude,’ he observed. ‘I have specimens from ten to twenty-seven inches long and from eleven to twenty-five inches in circumference, the substance of the bone being more than two inches thick.’

Recognising from the herbivorous teeth that he had evidence of a second type of giant creature different from the carnivorous Oxford monster, but perhaps not liking to court controversy by suggesting he had found a herbivorous lizard, he classified other giant bones under a different heading: ‘Teeth and Bones of Unknown Animals’. He wrote: ‘a brief description of these fossils is here inserted not in the hope of being able to elucidate their nature, but to record their existence in the Tilgate Forest with a view to future enquiries … [The teeth] are of a very singular character and differ from any previously known.’ He had the crown of the teeth only, he explained, unattached to the jaw. Although they were worn, some specimens were 1.4 inches long: ‘when perfect these specimens must have been of a very considerable size’.

Mantell even pointed out the analogy between the fossils of Tilgate and those of Stonesfield in Oxfordshire. Perhaps in a gentle spur to Professor Buckland, he wrote ‘the Stonesfield limestone has long been celebrated for the extraordinary character of its fossils, of which however, no detailed account has yet appeared before the public’. With the assistance of Mr Charles Lyell ‘and aided by an interesting collection of Stonesfield fossils for which I am indebted to his liberality,’ he continued, ‘I have been able to ascertain that the following organic remains occur in both deposits: