THE
DINOSAUR
HUNTERS

A Story of Scientific RivalryAnd the Discovery of thePrehistoric World

Deborah Cadbury

Dedication

For my mother and Martin,

the first readers,

with love

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

PART ONE

1 An Ocean Turned to Stone

2 The World in a Pebble

3 Toast of Mice and Crocodiles for Tea

4 The Subterranean Forest

5 The Giant Saurians

PART TWO

6 The Young Contender

7 Satan’s Creatures

8 The Geological Age of Reptiles

9 Nature, Red in Tooth and Claw

10 Nil Desperandum

PART THREE

11 Dinosauria

12 The Arch-hater

13 Dinomania

14 Nature without God?

Epilogue

Notes and Sources

Select Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Praise

Other Works

Copyright

About the Publisher

PART ONE

1 An Ocean Turned to Stone

She sells sea-shells on the sea-shore,

The shells she sells are sea-shells, I’m sure

For if she sells sea-shells on the sea-shore

Then I’m sure she sells sea-shore shells.

Tongue-twister by Terry Sullivan, 1908,

associated with Mary Anning

On the south coast of England at Lyme Regis in Dorset, the cliffs tower over the surrounding landscape. The town hugs the coast under the lee of a hill that protects it from the south-westerly wind. To the west, the harbour is sheltered by the Cobb, a long, curling sea wall stretching out into the English Channel – the waves breaking ceaselessly along its perimeter. To the east, the boundary of the local graveyard clings to the disintegrating Church Cliffs, with lichen-covered gravestones jutting out to the sky at awkward angles. Beyond this runs the dark, forbidding crag face of Black Ven, damp from sea spray. The landscape then levels off across extensive sweeps of country, to where the cliffs dip to the town of Charmouth, before rising sharply again to form the great heights of Golden Cap.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, according to local folklore, the stones on Lyme Bay were considered so distinctive that smugglers running ashore on ‘blind’ nights knew their whereabouts just from a handful of pebbles. However, it was not only smugglers and pirates who became familiar with the peculiarities of these famous cliffs. Through a series of coincidences and discoveries Lyme Bay soon became known as one of the main areas for fossil hunting. Locked in the layers of shale and limestone known as the ‘blue lias’ were the secrets of a vast, ancient ocean now turned to stone, the first clue to an unknown world.

In 1792, war erupted in Europe and it became dangerous for the English gentry to travel on the Continent. Many of the well-to-do classes adopted the resorts of the south coast of England. The dramatic scenery around Lyme Bay became a favourite among those who spent part of the season at Bath. In the summer, smart carriages often lined the Parade and the steep, narrow streets that nestled into the hillside. The novelist Jane Austen was among those who visited early in the nineteenth century. She was charmed by the High Street, ‘almost hurrying into the sea’, and ‘the very beautiful line of cliffs stretching out to the east’. The Cobb curving around the harbour became the dramatic setting for scenes in her new novel Persuasion. It was here that Louisa Musgrove fell ‘lifeless … her eyes closed, her face like death’, and was nursed back to health by the romantic sea captain.

Jane Austen’s letters to her sister, Cassandra, reveal that during her short stay she met an artisan in the town by the name of Richard Anning. He was summoned to value the broken lid of a box and, according to Jane Austen, was a sharp dealer. She told her sister that Anning’s estimate, at five shillings, was ‘beyond the value of all the furniture in the room together’.

Richard Anning, even as a skilled carpenter, struggled to make a living. The blockade of European ports during the Napoleonic Wars had caused severe food shortages. With no European corn available, the price of wheat had risen sharply, from 43 shillings a quarter in 1792 just before the war, to 126 shillings in 1812. Since bread and cheese was the staple diet for many in the southern counties, the spiralling price of a loaf caused great suffering. Wages did not rise during this period, and in many districts workers received a supplement from the parish to enable them to buy bread. Industrious labourers effectively became paupers relying on parish charity, and there was a real fear of starvation. While the gentry, glimpsed beyond sweeping parklands in their country estates, benefited from high prices and seemed impervious to the effects of war, the poor began to riot. The flaming rick or barn became a symbol of the times. Richard Anning was himself a ringleader of one protest over food shortages.

In rural Dorset, the poor were not only hungry, but with a shortage of fuel they also faced damp, cold conditions and sometimes worse. Richard Anning and his wife, Molly, lived in a cottage in a curious array of houses built on a bridge over the mouth of the River Lym. On one occasion, they awoke to find that ‘the ground floor of their home had been washed away during the night’. Their modest home had succumbed to an ‘exceptionally rough sea which had worked the havoc’.

The desire to keep warm could have lain behind a tragedy that befell the Annings’ eldest child, Mary, at Christmas in 1798. The event was reported starkly in the Bath Chronicle: ‘A child, four years of age, of Mr R. Anning, a cabinet maker of Lyme, was left by the mother about five minutes … in a room where there were some shavings by a fire … The girl’s clothes caught fire and she was so dreadfully burnt as to cause her death.’ Whether Mary was huddling too close to the flames for warmth, or accidentally stumbled, is not known. It is known, however, that her distraught mother, on the birth of their next daughter six months later, called her Mary in memory of her dead sister.

Naming a newborn after a child that had died was a common practice at a time when a quarter of poor infants died in their first year and half were dead before the age of five. Many were undernourished and readily succumbed to consumption, pneumonia, smallpox, measles or other diseases. Apart from the sudden death of their eldest daughter Mary, the Annings had already lost two other children, Martha and Henry, by the year 1800. But fate was to intervene in an unexpected way in the young life of the second Mary Anning.

That summer, when Mary was just one year old, news reached Lyme Regis that a touring company of riders was to perform near the town. Among the enticements were a display of vaulting, riding stunts and a lottery, with prizes such as copper tea-kettles and legs of mutton. The arrival of the travelling performers was a welcome distraction for the local inhabitants, and crowds of people trekked past the church and the gaol near the Annings’ house to the equestrian show, set in a field on the outskirts of town. Mary was taken along in the care of a local nurse, Mrs Elizabeth Hasking.

By late afternoon a heavy thunderstorm developed, but the crowds would not disperse, perhaps lingering to see who had won the lottery. Then, in the words of the local schoolmaster, George Roberts: ‘a vivid discharge of electric fluid ensued, followed by the most awful clap of thunder that any present ever remembered hearing, which re-echoed around the fine cliffs of Lyme Bay. All appeared deafened by the crash. After a momentary pause a man gave the alarm by pointing to a group that lay motionless under a tree.’

There were three dead women, among them Mary’s nurse, Elizabeth, whose hair, arm and cap along the right side were ‘much burnt and the flesh wounded’. She was still holding the baby, who was insensible and could not be roused. The second Mary Anning, known to be ‘dear to her parents’, was carried back to Lyme, ‘in appearance dead’. But when bathed in hot water, gradually she was revived, to the ‘joyful exclamations of the assembled crowd’. According to the family, this was a turning-point for the young Mary Anning: ‘She had been a dull child before but after this accident she became lively and intelligent.’

As Mary grew older, she took a keen interest in helping her father gather fossil ‘curios’ from the beach to sell to tourists. In the early part of the century, Richard Anning had several more children to support: the boys Joseph, Henry, Percival and Richard and another daughter, Elizabeth. To supplement his meagre income as a carpenter, Mary and her father set up a curiosity table outside their home to sell their wares to the tourists. However, selling fossils was a competitive business.

One collector, called the ‘Curi-man’ or Captain Cury and known locally as a ‘confounded rogue’, would intercept the coaches and sell specimens to travellers on the Exeter to London turnpike. Another ill-fated collector was Mr Cruikshanks, who could often be seen along the shoreline with a long pole like a garden hoe. When Cruikshanks lost the small stipend supporting him, leaving nothing but a tiny income from the sale of curios, he closed the account of his miserable existence and committed suicide by leaping off the Gun-Cliff wall in the centre of Lyme into the sea.

No one could explain what these ‘curios’ were. Petrified in the rocks on the shore were strange shapes, like fragments of the backbone of a giant, unknown creature. These were sold locally as ‘verteberries’. There were enormous pointed teeth, thought to be derived from alligators or crocodiles. Relics of ‘crocodilian snouts’ had been reported in the region for several years. There were also pretty fossil shells and stones, called ‘John Dory’s bones’ or ‘ladies’ fingers’.

At the time, throughout England, superstitions abounded about the meaning of fossils. The beautiful ammonites, called ‘cornemonius’ in the local dialect, with their elegant whorls like the coils of a curled-up serpent, were also known as ‘snake-stones’. The subject of the wildest speculation, such stones were thought in earlier centuries to have magical powers, and could even serve as an oracle. The ammonite, it was believed, could bring ‘protection against serpents and be a cure for blindness, impotence and barrenness’. Occasionally a snake’s head would be painted on the coils to be used as a charm. But snake-stones were not always a symbol of good fortune. In some regions it was thought that they were originally people, who for their crimes were first turned into snakes and then cast into stone. By divine retribution anyone who was evil could be turned to dust, just as Lot’s wife had been turned into a pillar of salt.

There were other strange curios, too, such as the long, pointed belemnites. These were said to be thunderbolts used by God, known colloquially as ‘devil’s fingers’ or ‘St Peter’s fingers’. These also had special powers. According to ancient tradition powdered belemnites could cure infections in horses’ eyes, and water in which belemnites had been dipped was even thought to cure horses of worms.

The fossils that resembled fragments of real creatures like snakes or crocodiles defied explanation. Myths of the time give tantalising insights. Some held that they were the ‘seed’ or ‘spirit’ of an animal, spontaneously generated deep within the earth, which would then grow in the stone. According to others, fossils were God’s interior ‘ornament’ of the earth, just as flowers were the exterior ornament. They might even have been planted by God as a test of faith! After all, if they were the remains of real animals that had once thrived, how had they burrowed their way down so deep into the rocks? And why would any creature do this? Alternatively, if the rocks had formed gradually around them, long after the animals had perished, this implied that God’s Creation had occurred over a period of time, not in a few days as described in Genesis. Entombed in the stony cliff-face was a mystery beyond explanation.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century many had absolute faith in the word of the Bible. To them, the most convincing explanation was that these were the remains of creatures that had died during Noah’s Flood and had been buried as the earth’s crust re-formed. Although there are no records of Mary Anning’s view as a child, it seems likely that this was the framework of colourful folklore and unyielding religious belief that informed her searches along the cliffs of Lyme Bay.

Mary became skilled at searching for ‘crocodiles’. Laid out on the table before their house were giant bones of ‘Crocodiles’, ‘Angels’ Wings’, ‘Cupid’s Wings’, ‘Verteberries’, and ‘Cornemonius’. Her searches on the beach made her mother Molly Anning very angry, as, according to Roberts the schoolmaster, ‘she considered the pursuit utterly ridiculous’. It was also dangerous. Rainwater endlessly percolating through layers of soft shales and clays caused frequent mudslides and rockfalls, especially in winter. There was also the risk of being caught by the sea as the fossils, revealed by erosion, had to be removed before the tide turned and the waves washed them away. Sometimes Mary and her father were trapped by the rising waves between the sea and the cliffs, and had to struggle up the slippery rockface to safety. On one occasion, Richard Anning was caught in a landslide as part of the Church Cliffs collapsed into the sea, and narrowly escaped being carried down with the rocks and crushed on the beach below.

One night in 1810, however, Anning was not so lucky when, taking a short cut to Charmouth, he strayed from the path and fell over the treacherous cliffs at Black Ven. He was severely weakened by his injuries and soon succumbed to the endemic consumption and died. Molly and the children were destitute. They had no savings; indeed, Richard Anning had left his family with £120 worth of debt, a large sum at a time when the average labourer’s wage was around 10 shillings a week. There was no way that Molly could readily pay back such a debt. As a result, she was obliged to face the humiliating prospect of appealing for help from the Overseers of the Parish Poor. It was a considerable misfortune for an artisan family.

Under the old Poor Laws dating from Tudor times, the poverty-stricken could be accommodated in one of fifteen thousand Poor Houses in England, where inmates struggled with conditions recognisable from the pages of Charles Dickens. Alternatively the poor received ‘outdoor poor relief’, as in the case of the Annings, which enabled them to stay in their own home while receiving a supplement from the parish. Although conditions on outdoor relief varied across districts, it was usually a miserly amount for food and clothing, or sometimes given in kind as bread and potatoes. The average weekly payment on outdoor poor relief was three shillings at a time when the minimum needed to scrape a living was six or seven shillings a week. Paupers were thus dependent on charity or could appeal to relatives for support. Older children were expected to help out with any number of tasks – horse holding, running as messengers, and cleaning or other domestic work. It was common for those on poor relief to be severely malnourished, and the hardships the Anning family endured were so severe that of all the children, only Mary and Joseph were to survive.

While Joseph, Mary’s elder brother, was apprenticed to an upholsterer, Mary continued to search the beach for fossils. One day she found a beautiful ammonite, or snake-stone. As she carried her trophy from the beach a lady in the street offered to buy it for half a crown. For Mary this was wealth indeed, enough to buy some bread, meat and possibly tea and sugar for a week. From that moment she ‘fully determined to go down upon the beach again’.

During 1811 – the exact date is not known – Joseph made a remarkable discovery while he was walking along the beach. Buried in the shore below Black Ven, a strange shape caught his eye. As he unearthed the sand and shale, the giant head of a fossilised creature slowly appeared, four feet long, the jaws filled with sharp interlocking teeth, the eye sockets huge like saucers. On one side of the head the bony eye was entire, staring out at him from some unknown past. The other eye was damaged, deeply embedded in the broken bones of the skull. Joseph immediately hired the help of two men to assist him and uncovered what was thought to be the head of a very large crocodile.

Joseph showed Mary where he had found the enormous skull, but since that section of the beach was covered by a mudslide for many months afterwards it was difficult to look for more relics of the creature. Nearly a year elapsed before Mary, who was still scarcely more than twelve or thirteen, came across a fragment of fossil buried nearly two feet deep on the shore, a short distance from where Joseph had found the head.

Working with her hammer around the rock, she found large vertebrae, up to three inches wide. As she uncovered more, it was possible to glimpse ribs buried in the limestone, several still connected to the vertebrae. She gathered some men to help her extract the fossils from the shore. Gradually, they revealed an entire backbone, made up of sixty vertebrae. On one side, the shape of the skeleton could be clearly seen; it was not unlike a huge fish with a long tail. On the other side, the ribs were ‘forced down upon the vertebrae and squeezed into a mass’ so that the shape was harder to discern. As the fantastic creature emerged from its ancient tomb they could see this had been a giant animal, up to seventeen feet long.

News spread fast through the town that Mary Anning had made a tremendous discovery: an entire connected skeleton. The local lord of the manor, Henry Hoste Henley, bought it from her for £23: enough to feed the family for well over six months.

The strange creature was first publicly displayed in Bullock’s Museum in Piccadilly in the heart of London. It quite baffled the scholars who came to visit, as there was no scientific context in England within which they could readily make sense of the giant fossil bones. Geology was in its infancy and palaeontology did not exist. The peculiar ‘crocodile’, with its jaw set in a disconcerting smile and its enormous bony eyes, was something inexplicable from the primeval world. In the words of a report in Charles Dickens’s journal, All the Year Round, there was to be a ‘ten year siege before the monster finally surrendered’ and revealed its long-buried secrets to the gentlemen of science. Nearly a decade was to elapse before the experts could even agree on a name for the ancient creature.

As news of Mary Anning’s discovery reached scholarly circles in London and beyond, one of the first to visit her at Lyme Regis was William Buckland, a Fellow of the prestigious Corpus Christi College at Oxford University. Engravings of William Buckland portray a serious man, with even features and a broad expanse of forehead. Invariably, in these period poses, he is holding some fossil and formally attired in sombre black academic robes, looking the epitome of the nineteenth-century scientist. To those who knew him, he was renowned for qualities other than this stern and imposing image.

‘Dr Buckland’s wonderful conversational powers were as incommunicable as the bouquet of a bottle of champagne,’ wrote Storey Maskelyne, one of his Oxford colleagues. ‘It was at the feast of reason and the flow of social and intellectual intercourse that Buckland shone. A merrier man within the limit of becoming mirth I never spent an hour’s talk withal. Nothing came amiss with him from the creation of the world, to the latest news in town … In build, look and manner he was a thorough English gentleman, and was appreciated within every circle.’

Although Buckland had a wide range of interests his greatest passion was for ‘undergroundology’, as he called the new subject of geology. Many of his holidays from Oxford were spent at Lyme, where he explored the cliffs ‘with that geological celebrity, Mary Anning, in whose company he was to be seen wading up to his knees in the sea, searching for fossils in the blue lias’. At his lodgings by the sea, Buckland’s breakfast table was ‘loaded with beefsteaks and Belemnites, tea and Terebratula, muffins and Madrepores, toast and Trilobites, every table and chair as well as the floor occupied with fossils and rocks, earth, clays and heaps of books, his breakfast hour being the only time that the collectors could be sure of finding him, to bring their contributions and receive their pay’.

Born in the village of Axminster six miles inland from the Dorset coast, Buckland was no stranger to the impressive cliffs at Lyme. Since his childhood, the rocks of this region had enchanted him. ‘They were my geological school,’ he wrote, ‘they stared me in the face, they wooed me and caressed me, saying at every turn, Pray, Pray, be a geologist!’ His father, the Reverend Charles Buckland, had encouraged his enquiring approach to natural history. Following an accident, Charles Buckland was blind for the last twenty years of his life, but together father and son had explored the local quarries, the young William describing every detail of the beautiful fossil shells that his father could only touch. The boy’s exceptional ‘talent and industry’ were noted by his uncle, a Fellow at Oxford University, who steered William’s education, first to Winchester and then on to Corpus Christi College.

When William Buckland descended from his carriage in the city of famous spires at the turn of the nineteenth century, he had soon found that the university was steeped in an Anglican tradition in which the Scriptures, for many, were the key to understanding our history, and fossils were interpreted in this context. Most of the college lecturers took Holy Orders and advancement was principally through the Anglican Church. Buckland was himself ordained in 1809 and elected a Fellow in the same year.

At the time, more than a hundred years before radiometric dating was to dispel any lingering doubts about the vast antiquity of the globe, it was impossible to prove with certainty its exact age. For over two centuries, leading scholars had tried to solve this puzzle by taking the Bible as evidence. Studies of the earth were carried out by classicists, who could analyse sacred writings in Hebrew, Latin or Greek. In 1650 the Archbishop of Armagh, James Ussher, had concluded that God created the earth the night preceding Sunday 23 October, 4,004 years before the birth of Christ. His calculation had been made by adding together the life spans of the descendants of Adam, combined with knowledge of the Hebrew calendar and other biblical records. His dating of the earth, far from being ridiculed, was accepted as an excellent piece of historical scholarship, and following his lead, the study of chronology using sacred texts became an established approach for the next two hundred years.

Other methods of dating the earth were occasionally put forward. In 1715, Edmond Halley had proposed an ingenious experiment to the Royal Society in which the rate of increase in the saltiness of lakes and oceans could be calculated, assuming that they contained no salt when the globe was created. However, his ideas were not pursued, and Halley himself thought his results were likely to confirm ‘the evidence of the Sacred Writ, [that] Mankind has dwelt about 6,000 Years’.

Apart from revealing the age of the earth, the Bible had other geological implications that were to prove equally challenging for the early geologists like William Buckland. The prophet Moses outlined the story of Creation in which God made the Heavens, the Earth and every living thing in just seven days. In the biblical Creation story all creatures were made simultaneously. There is no prehistory in the Bible, and no prehistoric animals.

Moses also described a universal Flood in which ‘all the fountains of the great deep and the windows of heaven were opened’, and the entire face of the earth was wiped out, destroying all creatures except the few saved in Noah’s Ark. Sacred texts were scrutinised so as to shed more light on these events. One highly respected seventeenth-century naturalist, a German Jesuit, Athanasius Kircher, produced a detailed paper on the dimensions of the Ark and its animal contents. This approach was still flourishing in 1815, when the Reverend Stephen Weston studied changing place-names in Hebrew and Greek and claimed to locate the very site where Noah’s Ark came to land – on one of the highest mountains of the earth in Tibet.

At Oxford, William Buckland knew that anomalies unearthed in the rocks during the eighteenth century had challenged religious scholarship. Many stones resembling creatures or plants had been uncovered in locations that defied explanation. How could it be that sea shells were found on the peaks of the highest mountains? Was this evidence for the Flood and, if so, how had such vast amounts of water been suddenly generated and then fallen away? Savants were hard-pressed to explain why stones that looked just like animal teeth were found deeply embedded in solid rock, or how plants had become petrified within layers of coal. If fossils were the remains of animals, why were bones of tropical animals found in cold northern regions? Had the climate been mysteriously inverted? Stranger still, why was it that fossils resembling fish buried in one rock could be covered by layers of rock that contained only land animals, and in turn have shells and sea plants in the rocks above? This seemed to provide evidence of astonishing disorder and devastation, which was hard to understand if the world was purposefully designed in seven days by the Almighty Creator.

By the late eighteenth century scholars were making progress in understanding the history of the earth, not by taking the Bible as evidence, but the rocks themselves. One of the spurs for this was the growth of the mining industry in parts of Northern Europe such as Thuringia and Saxony. It was here on the present border between Germany and Poland that a pioneering thinker, Abraham Werner, created an order out of the seemingly haphazard formation of rocks beneath the earth’s surface.

Abraham Werner was taken out of school at Bunzlau when his mother died, and sent to work for his father who managed the local ironworks for the Duke of Solm. He later entered the great Mining Academy of Freiberg, where his teaching on mineralogy became famous throughout Europe. Werner’s ideas and others’ showed that the earth’s crust could be classified into four distinct categories of rock, which were always found to be in the same order of succession. The oldest of these were the crystalline rocks such as granite, gneiss and schist, containing no fossils. These became known as the Primary rocks, corresponding to the most primitive period of the earth’s history, since these rocks were laid down first in the earth’s crust. Above these in order of succession were the Transition rocks, including greywackes, slates and limestone. Only a small number of fossils could be found here. This was followed by the Secondary period, with highly stratified rocks, sandstones, limestones, gypsum and many other layers, filled with fossils. Finally, the most recent were the generally unconsolidated deposits of gravels, sand and clays, corresponding to the Tertiary period.

Rather than accepting that the earth’s crust had formed in a mere six thousand years, Abraham Werner speculated that the older Primary and Transition rocks had formed more than a million years ago, by precipitation from a universal ocean that once enveloped the whole world. His theory implied that the order of rocks he had identified in Saxony would be found elsewhere. If his observations were right, the consequences of his findings were huge, as they were proof that locked within the earth’s crust was evidence of distinct periods in its formation. By identifying an order in the layers of rock, Werner was offering the world a glimpse of prehistory.

Even more perplexing amid the lecture-rooms of deans and bishops at Oxford was a new theory put forward by a Scotsman, James Hutton. He did not accept Werner’s view that the older rocks had precipitated from a universal ocean, but envisaged that they were formed gradually by erosion and deposition. This led him to speculate that the history of the earth was so vast it was almost immeasurable.

From his observations Hutton inferred that the earth was caught in an endless cycle of forming and re-forming the landscape: cycles in which rivers carried sediment from the land to the sea; layers of sediment gently accumulated and compacted into stone on the sea floor, until earth movements lifted the layers out of the sea, folding the different strata to form a new landscape. Since, he reasoned, the erosion of land and the accumulation of sediment take millions of years, the only conclusion was that the landscape had formed over millennia. In his book, Theory of the Earth, he wrote of the earth’s history, ‘there is no vestige of a beginning and no prospect of an end’.

The ideas of Hutton, Werner and others opened the door to an unfamiliar landscape as well as a vast, unknown history of the earth. This abyss of geological time was almost as strangely unbelievable as the vastness of stellar space opened up by Copernicus in astronomy two centuries earlier. The new theories questioned the long-established chronology for the earth’s age of Archbishop Ussher, and with it, the authority of the Bible. Many thinkers felt that this was a dangerous pursuit. Richard Kirwan, President of the Royal Academy in Ireland, was one of several leading thinkers to ridicule Hutton’s claims, pointing out that this was ‘fatal’ to the account in Moses and therefore a threat to morality. Hutton’s theory was so obviously flawed that Kirwan had found it quite unnecessary to even read it!

William Buckland, brought up in the heart of the Anglican establishment but drawn to a rigorous, scientific approach to gathering evidence, was eager to understand the true history of the globe within which fossils could be correctly understood. Wishing to reconcile the two seemingly opposing sides of his nature, he dedicated himself to proving that religion and science did not stand opposed to each other, but were complementary. For him, geology was a ‘master science’ through which he could investigate the signature of God.

In 1813, when Buckland was appointed Reader in Mineralogy at Oxford, such was his enthusiasm to make sense of the apparently conflicting opinions about the earth’s history that he embarked on a detailed study of all the rocks of England, travelling with his friend, George Bellas Greenough. Greenough had helped to found the Geological Society of London in 1807. This began as a ‘little talking Geological Dinner Club’ in a central London tavern, and had rapidly blossomed into a scientific society which aimed to ‘make geologists acquainted with each other, stimulate their zeal … and contribute to the advance of Geological Science’.

Touring with Greenough, Buckland aimed to construct a geological map for the Society of all the strata they could identify, showing the different layers of rock in each region and comparing the fossils within them. Would the layers of rock in England correspond to those in the European rocks? What did the different formations reveal about prehistory?

With infectious enthusiasm, Buckland also enlisted the support of his long-standing friend, the intellectual Reverend William Conybeare, who had graduated from Oxford just before Buckland, taking a first in classics at Christ Church with effortless ease. The unconventional party also called upon ‘the zealous interest of some ladies of high culture at Penrice Castle, Lady Mary Cole and the Misses Talbots’, and any other like-minded individuals they met along the way. Buckland’s energetic and novel approach, which would not be constrained by centuries of Oxford tradition, was viewed with more than a little suspicion.

Whereas most gentlemen’s travelling carriages would have been of a certain standard, with an elegantly appointed interior matched, perhaps, by a smartly painted exterior and with discreet uniformed staff in attendance, William Buckland’s carriage provided a very different travelling experience. The sturdy frame was specially strengthened to allow for heavy loads of rocks; the front was fitted with a furnace and implements for assays and analysis of the mineral content of the stone; and there was scarcely room to sit amid the curiosities and fossils heaped into every available space.

Gossip abounded, too, about Buckland’s other little eccentricities. It was the custom for early geologists to carry out their fieldwork in the full splendour of a gentleman’s suit, with academic robes and even a top-hat. When travelling in the mail, Buckland was not beyond dropping his hat and handkerchief in the road to stop the coach if he spotted an interesting rock. On one occasion he happened to fall asleep on the top of the coach. An old woman, eyeing his bulging pockets with growing interest, eventually couldn’t resist emptying them, only to find to her astonishment that the gentleman, for all his finery, had pockets full of nothing but stones.

Sometimes Buckland rode a favourite old black mare, usually burdened with heavy bags and hammers. It was said that the mare was so accustomed to her master’s ways that even if a stranger was riding her, she would stop at every quarry and nothing would persuade her to advance until her rider had dismounted and pretended to examine the surrounding stones. Buckland became so expert on the rocks of England that his ‘geological nose’ could even tell him his precise locality. Once, when riding to London with a colleague on a very dark night, they lost their way. To his friend’s astonishment Buckland dismounted and, grabbing a handful of soil, smelled it and declared, ‘Ah Uxbridge!’

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

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.

The main forum for geologists was in the scientific societies springing up in the metropolis such as the Geological Society and the longer-established Royal Society. But they were largely for gentlemen of rank and wealth, and gaining membership cost time and money. Of these, the Royal Society was the most famous; its Council had provided instructions for Captain Cook’s voyage of discovery and advised the government on scientific matters such as the best form of lightning conductors for buildings. The membership list read like the entries of the fashionable new guide to Society, Debrett. Lords, knights and men who ‘from their fortunes it might be desirable to retain as patrons of science’ dominated the list of Fellows. A shoemaker’s son, however brilliant, was largely invisible to this scientific community. But while in London, a chance meeting was to set Gideon Mantell on his future course.

In 1811, the year Mary Anning’s brother found the skull of the Ichthyosaurus, a distinguished doctor, James Parkinson, published the final volume of his studies on geology, Organic Remains of a Former World. Mantell may have been drawn to Parkinson because, like his father, he was a man of conscience, interested in reform. Parkinson had published such inflammatory pamphlets as While the Honest Poor are wanting Bread and Revolution without Bloodshed, advocating universal suffrage. He had even come dangerously close to transportation to Australia in 1794, when he was arrested for an alleged connection with the ‘Pop Gun Plot’ to assassinate King George III with a poisoned dart while he was at the opera. He was exonerated from treason, but after this incident he restricted his political interests to social reforms, to improving conditions for pauper children, and to treatments for the insane in asylums. James Parkinson is now better remembered as the doctor who first defined ‘Parkinson’s disease’, the degenerative illness marked by shaking and tremors.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, though, Parkinson was equally well known as a geologist. Along with William Buckland and George Greenough, he was one of the founder members of the Geological Society and had embarked on a detailed survey of everything known about the ‘Ante-Diluvian World’. To Mantell in the Lewes library eagerly taking in the descriptions of the entire vegetable and animal fossil kingdom, Parkinson’s work was an inspiration. Putting aside any scruples about imposing on such an eminent gentleman, he made an appointment to visit Parkinson in Hoxton Square, Shoreditch, in East London.

His nervousness at seeking ‘the pleasure and the privilege’ of such an acquaintance was soon dispelled by James Parkinson’s ‘mild, courteous manner’, Mantell wrote, and the enthusiasm with which he ‘explained to me the principal objects in his cabinets and pointed out every source of information on fossil remains’. Parkinson had assiduously gathered details of Georges Cuvier’s studies in Paris and could tell Mantell of his famous discoveries: the giant extinct mammals, the mastodon, Megatherium and mammoth, and ancient species of crocodiles found around Honfleur and Le Havre. Cuvier believed that the fossil bones of crocodiles came from limestone beds of ‘very high antiquity … considerably older than those which contain the bones of quadrupeds’.

Parkinson had been greatly influenced by the pioneering work of the surveyor William Smith. Whereas Werner, in Saxony, identified rocks principally on the basis of their mineral composition, Smith had recognised that fossils could be used to help identify the beds. In his publication of 1811 Parkinson was careful to classify fossils according to the strata in which they were found; each layer of rock with its entombed fossils was for him a ‘former world’ which held the secrets of the history of the globe.

Parkinson, like Buckland, was intrigued by the conflict between geology and religion and was resolved ‘to shrink from no question … however repugnant to popular opinion’. He concluded that the account of Moses in the Bible ‘is confirmed in every respect, except as to the age of the world, and the distance of time between the completion of different parts of Creation’. Although there was no way of proving the earth’s antiquity, he acknowledged that the formation of the globe and the creation of life ‘must have been the work of a vast length of time’. Following an idea first raised by scholars in the eighteenth century, he reasoned that if the word ‘day’ in Genesis was used ‘to designate indefinite periods in which particular parts of the great work of Creation was accomplished, no difficulty will then remain’.

Parkinson fired the young Mantell with his romantic description of ‘former worlds’ buried in the rock. Each stratum enveloped evidence of a vanished existence, and the geologist could ‘begin to fathom the different revolutions which had swept over the earth in ages antecedent to all human record or tradition’. Parkinson wrote: ‘even the enormous chains of mountains which seem to load the surface of the earth are vast monuments in which these remains of former ages are entombed … they are hourly suffering those changes by which after thousands of years they become the chief constituent parts of gems; the limestone which forms the humble cottage of the peasant, or the marble which adorns the splendid palace of the Prince.’ The mountains, the hills and the land beneath their feet: all these were vast tombs more astounding than the pyramids.

It was through meetings with men like Parkinson that Mantell’s ambitions began to take shape. It was, he thought, the role of the scientist ‘to unveil God’s secrets … and unravel the mysteries of the beautiful world through which he was destined to pass’. James Parkinson had found time for geology while practising as a doctor. Mantell, too, would carry on his childhood dream. He would devote every spare minute to exploring these ancient memorials to a buried past that had existed, it seemed, before Adam. When he returned home to Sussex, he planned to make a systematic study of the strata and fossils of the county, a subject which he viewed as ‘replete with interest and instruction’. This married together his fascination with the subject and his desire to make a name for himself that might bring back honour to his family name.

At the age of twenty-one he gained his diploma of membership of the Royal College of Surgeons and returned to Lewes, where he was immediately offered a partnership with his former master, James Moore. It was soon apparent that he faced a gruelling workload as a country doctor. Epidemics of cholera, typhoid and smallpox still raged. ‘An immense number of Persons in this Town and neighbourhood are ill with Typhus Fever,’ he recorded in his diary on one occasion. ‘I have visited upwards of 40 or 50 patients every day for some time: yesterday I visited 64. The small pox is also very prevalent, 14 have died with it, Taylor in Malling Street who had it in 1794 is now covered with various pustules and has been very ill.’ Armed with little more than boxes of leeches, which were sent from London in boxes of two hundred, he struggled on against these deadly diseases.

His practice included attendance on the sick poor of three parishes, for which he was paid £20 a year, and treating the inmates of the Poor House at St John’s, near Lewes. Long before the development of emergency services, the local doctor provided the only care, even for the severely injured: ‘This morning I was summoned to Ringmer, a poor woman on the Green, Mrs Tasker, had set fire to her clothes and was most dreadfully burnt, it is scarcely possible she should survive.’ For five weeks he visited for an hour every day to change her dressings. When she died, he noted, ‘I am almost fatigued to death.’

There were numerous mills in the district for grinding corn, for producing rapeseed oil and flour, and for brewing or malting, and even for producing paper. With child labour, accidents were common and, without anaesthetic, invariably traumatic: ‘I was called to a most distressing accident at Chailey Mill. A poor boy got his clothes entangled by an upright post that was rapidly revolving; the lad in consequence was whirled round with great velocity and his legs were dashed against a beam. It was considered absolutely necessary to amputate the left leg above the knee, but the constitutional shock was so great that the poor boy died the next day.’

The hours of Gideon Mantell’s medical practice were long and unpredictable, especially since he excelled at midwifery, delivering between two and three hundred babies a year. At a time when the average mortality for women in some hospitals was as high as one in thirty, Mantell had only two deaths in over two thousand births during fifteen years. His great success came at a price: ‘frequently I have been up for six or seven nights in succession: an occasional hour’s sleep in my clothes being the only repose I could obtain’. Nonetheless, with his conscientiousness and tireless energy he gradually increased the profits on the practice from £250 a year to £750.

Despite the immense pressures of his medical workload, Mantell was prepared to sacrifice his few leisure hours to make headway in geology as well. With the carelessness of youth he spared himself nothing, often studying until the small hours and rising after just four hours’ sleep, to see his patients before embarking on some geological expedition.

There were numerous local pits and quarries such as Jenner’s quarry, Malling Hill Pit, Malling Street Pit, Southerham Pit, each laying bare the strata of Sussex. Following the approach of William Smith, he aimed to construct a geological chart of the correct sequence of the local rocks. He paid the pit labourers for any interesting fossils that he could add to his cabinet, and soon became familiar with the beautiful creatures of this former sea. To help identify the invertebrates, Mantell wrote to James Sowerby, a naturalist who was compiling a catalogue of fossil shells. There were many different species of ammonite, the extinct mollusc with a spiral shell that had so enchanted him as a child. In gratitude for the perfect specimens Mantell sent, Sowerby named one species after him: Ammonites mantelli. Embedded with the ammonites in the chalk were bivalves, sponges and another extinct mollusc, the belemnites, with their characteristic conical shell divided into chambers.

As Mantell gained in confidence, he established a network of correspondence with those of similar interest, such as the indefatigable Etheldred Benett – a woman of formidable intellect and serious endeavour, not one to swoon with delight at fashion’s latest dictates or, indeed, to follow them. Although from a prosperous family in Wiltshire, Miss Benett did not succumb to the usual conventions of a woman in county society. Rather than settling into marriage in some comfortable country rectory she stayed firmly unattached, and her pony carriage would often be seen on the hills of Wiltshire while she pursued her main interest, geology. She devoted her life to her collection, and became so well known that eventually her name alone in the literature would suffice to denote work of outstanding quality.

For Mantell such correspondence was both prestigious – she was, after all, a member of the gentry – and highly beneficial, since he could extend his knowledge beyond Sussex. He wrote to her in 1814, requesting ‘the honour of a correspondence’. Miss Benett graciously replied by sending a hamper of fossils to the wagon office in Lewes. Soon they were immersed in comparing the strata of Wiltshire and Sussex, trying to decide which rocks lay above and below others in the sequence. Although not yet known as such they were trying to unravel the sequence of ‘Cretaceous’ rocks across Southern England, which had been formed between 144 and 66 million years ago. Mantell was aided in this by another member of the gentry, George Greenough, who was busily engaged in developing his geological map of England with William Buckland. Greenough was only too keen to capitalise on Mantell’s enthusiasm, frequently requesting more detailed information on the Sussex rocks. By 1815, Mantell had already identified several different strata within the chalk formation around Lewes, the lowest being blue marl, then chalk marl, lower chalk and upper chalk. Greenough steered his research and provided advice on naming the rocks.

In the course of his medical duties, Gideon Mantell was summoned to the assistance of a Mr George Woodhouse, a prosperous gentleman who owned a linen-draper’s business in London. While giving ‘unremitting professional attention’ to Mr Woodhouse, Mantell could hardly fail to notice his patient’s eldest daughter Mary. Her portrait shows a young woman with a mass of dark curls piled high, and large, regarding eyes, her face set off by a fashionably off-the-shoulder dress. She shared his interest in fossils and gave him gifts – corals from Worcestershire and other curiosities she had found. They soon ‘formed an attachment’ and, it would appear, could not wait to get married.

The bride was only twenty, a minor in the eyes of the law, when she married in May 1816, by special licence and with the consent of her mother as guardian. Unfortunately, her father did not live to see the wedding. Thanking Mantell for his ‘professional exertions and kind attention’ shortly before he died, Mr Woodhouse presented him with a treasured gift of James Parkinson’s survey of the fossil kingdom.

Once settled in Lewes, Mary Mantell dutifully helped her husband with the painstaking task of searching for fossils, which was rapidly becoming his consuming interest. It was not uncommon for her to ride out with him on geological expeditions and sometimes even on his medical rounds, when she would check the ground for fossils while he visited patients. She soon found she could assist him with drawings of his finds, and patiently tried to master the art of scientific illustration. ‘I am much pleased with her [Mary’s] first attempt at etching,’ wrote Etheldred Benett to Mantell in 1817. ‘A little practice to enable her to work stronger and bolder appears to me all that is wanting to make them a great ornament to your work.’

With growing self-confidence in his geological observations, Gideon Mantell now decided to write a book setting out his findings on the rocks of Sussex, which he hoped would establish his scientific credentials and perhaps secure his membership of one of the prestigious scientific societies. Mary undertook the illustrations: a fragment of the claw of a crustacean, part of the dorsal fin of a fish, the extraordinary sharp spines of the Plagiostoma spinosa – all the dismembered bits of Nature in their incredible variety. With his wife’s total support and interest, Mantell described his happiness after his marriage as ‘greater than ever’.

As Gideon Mantell began to explore further afield, he realised that there was very different rock to be found in an area known as the Weald, a forest-covered ridge lying between the chalk hills of the North and South Downs. ‘Advancing from the Downs, an outcrop of sandstone is first seen near Taylor’s bridge,’ he observed, ‘and it subsequently appears by the stream that winds along Cuckfield park. At this spot in Whiteman’s Green an excavation has been made.’ As he approached the quarry, he could see tucked below the gorse, wild thyme and trees clinging to the rocks at the surface, the Weald strata exposed to a depth of some forty feet. There were horizontal layers of sandstone, limestone and slate, lying on a bed of blue clays.

With growing excitement, as he examined fragments of rock he began to realise that the fossils entombed in the layers of sandstone and limestone at Whiteman’s Green were quite unlike the invertebrates of the chalk hills around Lewes. Embedded among the debris appeared to be petrified fragments of larger bones. He mentioned this in his letters to George Greenough and Etheldred Benett in the autumn of 1817, explaining that he had uncovered the teeth and bones of vertebrates: amphibia, perhaps crocodiles or alligators. However, the fossils were so mutilated and worn that they were almost impossible to interpret or classify. The logical, tidy plans of the past months, the neat orderly drawings of invertebrates, everything that had fired his imagination about the former sea of chalk, began to be overshadowed by these curious fossil beds.

Whiteman’s Green was too far from Lewes for Mantell to ride out each day, and with the arrival of his first child, Ellen Maria, in 1818 he had even less time than before. So he began negotiations with a Mr Leney who ran the quarry, and during the next year parcels from Cuckfield began to arrive at the Lewes wagon office. The first delivery was not particularly exciting: ‘the bones, teeth and the tongue of a fish’. After another abortive trip when ‘it rained in torrents nearly the whole of our journey’, Mantell ‘made further arrangements with Leney respecting the Cuckfield fossils’. He is likely to have taught the quarryman to search for the remains of larger bones. It wasn’t long before several packages arrived from him, including some fossils that Mantell described as ‘superb specimens’.

Among the fragments of larger bones there were also invertebrates, such as tiny fossil shells and snails. Mantell tried to describe these to Etheldred Benett, although he admitted they were so damaged ‘it is scarcely possible to ascertain the genera or species’. Nonetheless, Miss Benett thought the shells from the Weald were similar to those uncovered in a rock she knew called ‘Purbeck limestone’. This is a formation that stretches across Wiltshire and Dorset that was well established in the geological sequence as Secondary rock. The Weald and the Purbeck, Mantell wrote, following Miss Benett’s advice, ‘correspond in so many particulars … that there is every reason to suppose that they belong to the same formation’. If this was true, the rocks at Whiteman’s Green in the Weald lay well below the chalk at the top of the Secondary series. He was revealing tantalising glimpses of a former world that had thrived an unknown number of years before the fishes and ammonites embedded in the chalk.

All this time Mantell’s medical practice prospered, and he was able to buy a house in Castle Place from his former partner, James Moore, for £700. By 1819 he could afford the house next door and the two houses were knocked together, becoming known, grandly, as ‘Castle Place’. Positioned prominently in the High Street and backing on to Lewes Castle, the imposing home was a world apart from the modest cottage in St Mary’s Lane where Mantell had been brought up. A team of craftsmen was hired to create a gracious interior with Georgian windows to the floor, ornamental arches over the stairwell and even carvings of ammonites to decorate the Ionic columns at the front of the house. As if to complete the metamorphosis from bootmaker’s son to doctor of standing, Mantell adopted the coat-of-arms of his forebears and painted them, entwined with those of Woodhouse, on the porch outside and on the marble table in the dining-room. But if Mary Mantell was under any illusion that she might acquire an elegant new drawing-room to entertain guests, she was to be disappointed. Her husband’s burgeoning ‘little cabinet’ became a grand ‘Collection’ and quickly came to fill the new first-floor drawing-room.

As news of Gideon Mantell’s collection spread, visitors came to view the fossils. One caller was that same Lieutenant-Colonel Thomas Birch who had sought out Mary Anning; Mantell described him as a ‘very agreeable and intelligent man’. Birch had been touring the West Country and had spent much time in Dorset buying fossils of the Ichthyosaurus – or ‘Proteosaurus’ as it was still called – from Mary. Naturally, Mantell was intrigued to know how Birch’s giant Ichthyosaurus bones compared to the fragments he had found. In March 1820, shortly after the birth of his second son, Walter Baldock, Mantell received an intriguing letter from Lieutenant-Colonel Birch.

‘I am going to sell my collection for the benefit of the poor woman and her son and daughter at Lyme who have in truth found almost all the fine things,’ Birch wrote. ‘I found these people, the Annings, in considerable difficulty – on the act of selling their furniture to pay their rent – in consequence of their not having found one good fossil for near a twelvemonth. 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.’

Birch was genuinely concerned that the Annings had not been able to maintain their early success. Apart from an Ichthyosaurus uncovered in 1818, they had had no more significant finds. Birch’s sale was planned for 15 May, in the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly. Gideon Mantell attended the auction and had a chance to see Mary Anning’s ‘marine lizards’: an Ichthyosaur femur and head that was bought for Georges Cuvier in Paris, a partial skeleton, vertebrae and other fossils. Lieutenant-Colonel Birch’s sale raised £400 for the Annings.

Less than a month later, in June 1820, Gideon Mantell entered in his diary: ‘received a packet of fossils from Cuckfield. Among them was a fine fragment of an enormous bone; several vertebrae and some teeth.’ Having met Birch and seen Mary Anning’s giant sea lizards, he immediately wrote that these giant bones must belong to a ‘Proteosaurus or Ichthyosaurus.’ After all, this was the only large creature that had been described in England. Inspired by this discovery of the largest bone he had received so far, he began a series of excursions to Whiteman’s Green in the Weald, the mundane little quarry where workmen laboured for basic stone material, unaware that they were laying bare the secrets of the past. To Mantell the quarry was a magical place; it was like entering the ancient tombs, where extraordinary records of a former world were waiting to be explored. With great enthusiasm, on 16 August 1820 he took the entire family on an outing to the quarry: ‘We made an excursion to Cuckfield; my brother drove the ladies in his chaise and I rode on horseback.’

But the more specimens he found, the more baffling the site became. Strangely, although he believed the animal bones belonged to an Ichthyosaurus, or sea lizard, he began to find the petrified remains of land plants. These fossils were difficult to interpret, some blackened like charcoal, with cracks and fissures filled with white crystalline minerals or the brilliant bronze of fool’s gold. As he scrutinised the stone, he thought he could discern fragmentary remains of leaves, stems and other ‘ligneous structures’, which appeared to be of vegetable origin.

Before 1820, very little was known of fossil botany. In the eighteenth century, Carl Linnaeus had developed a detailed classification system for plants, establishing in his catalogues of several thousand plant species from all over the world the ground rules that a botanist should follow to describe and name plants correctly. Since then, other scholars had occasionally attempted to identify fossil plants, but there were few systematic studies of fossil species before 1820, and names had no legal status. Faced with tantalising impressions of the relics of plants that he could not recognise, Mantell had no knowledgeable source to which he could turn. ‘I am unacquainted with any vegetables either recent or fossil with which these remains can be identified,’ he wrote.

During one trip to the quarry at Cuckfield in 1820 he had a breakthrough. He unearthed, buried with more giant bones, part of a tree trunk more than three feet long, very weathered, with the rudiments of branches. He could see at once that the trunk was covered in distinctive diamond-shaped scars, resembling woody bases where leaf stalks were once attached. This was nothing like the English trees around him, the familiar indentations on the bark of oaks, chestnuts and birches. The roughened surface of the trunk, the pattern of scars from woody leaf stalks, were striking – like those of a tropical palm.

Mantell soon found other fossils, too, which bore more resemblance to a tropical flora. Some of the leaves and stems he thought were like Euphorbia from the East Indies, a lush, flowering shrub. With some confidence he entered in his journal on 17 August 1820: ‘Had a very fine specimen of Euphorbia from Cuckfield.’ Two weeks later, he sent ‘a large and beautiful specimen of fossil Euphorbia from Cuckfield to Mr Greenough … it was embedded in mastic, the same composition as used for the Minerets and Domes of the oriental palace at Brighton’. In fact, flowering plants, like Euphorbia and palms, had not yet appeared on the map of the primitive landscape. The history of fossil plants and the habitat for Mantell’s unknown giant creature were stranger than anything he could anticipate with the limited evidence then available to him.

In 1821, as Mantell was trying to find out more about tropical plants and animals, the Reverend William Conybeare completed his detailed study of Ichthyosaurus for the Geological Society. This was to provide another clue to the giant bones. Conybeare had included beautiful anatomical drawings of the bones of Ichthyosaurus. When Mantell compared the fossil bones that he had uncovered at Whiteman’s Green in the Weald, he found that they were very different from those of the sea lizard of Lyme. The vertebrae of an ichthyosaur were slender and deeply hollowed, allowing for the flexible movements of an animal living in water – nothing like the chunky, solid vertebrae that he had uncovered in Sussex. The leg bone of the Ichthyosaurus was more like the fin of a fish; the slender central bone, the humerus, ‘immediately supporting a very numerous series of small bones, form[ed] a very flexible paddle’. But the portion of giant femur, or thigh bone, that he had found in the Weald bore no resemblance to any bone in the sea lizard. It was truly enormous: the fragment, of the top part of the bone, was over two feet long and twenty inches in circumference. If this fragment of a giant leg was not derived from an Ichthyosaurus, then to what kind of monstrous creature could it belong?

Apart from the shape of the bones, there was another clue that the unknown creature from the Weald was not a sea lizard. When a creature dies at sea, its body sinks down to the ocean floor and is gradually covered by a fine rain of particles that form the new sediments. As it is gradually densely packed with layers of sediment accumulating above, the bony skeleton can be well preserved, just like the ichthyosaurs of Lyme. But when a creature dies on land it is much more likely to be destroyed, falling prey to some other animal or scattered by wind and rain, leaving only a confused jumble of bones. Mantell could recover only fragments of bone from the Weald, never a full skeleton. As yet, he had not even found two bones joined together. It occurred to him that these worn relics of giant bones might have belonged to a creature that spent at least part of its life on land, beneath the shade of palms.

In the quiet of night, when all the town was long since asleep and his medical duties were completed, Gideon Mantell studied the fossils he had found, so utterly absorbed in his work that he was often unaware that the small hours were approaching. With careful use of chisel and hammer, the shape of the bones slowly emerged from the surrounding stone like some strange primordial sculpture, perhaps more impressive than something that is finished, containing all the promise of a great work of art gradually taking shape before his eyes. He would glimpse eerie fragments of the ancient animal: the exquisitely smooth curve of the giant femur, the sharp points of the damaged vertebrae, the strange ridges on the enamel of the teeth; the foramina, or holes, for blood vessels, far larger than any human capillary. It was unearthly.

To try to make more sense of this confusing picture, he would use as a reference Georges Cuvier’s acclaimed four-volume summary, Recherches sur les Ossemens Fossiles des Quadrupèdes, which had been translated into English in 1813. Here Cuvier outlined the details of several species of ancient extinct crocodiles found at Honfleur and Le Havre. Mantell compared his fossils against Cuvier’s drawings, and some of the bones, especially the vertebrae, seemed to correspond. To obtain a second opinion, he now made arrangements to view the Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons in London. John Hunter’s collection of ten thousand anatomical specimens had been bought by the government after his death in 1793 and placed in the Royal College at Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Here, they were being catalogued by Hunter’s former apprentice, William Clift.

The child of a poor family in Devon, Clift possessed an exceptional talent for drawing which had been noticed by the local gentry, and he had been sent to assist Hunter. Greatly honoured by this appointment, the young Clift had laboured long hours for little pay, helping with dissections before breakfast at six in the morning and often not finishing until after midnight, the evenings being spent in dictation. Within a year of his apprenticeship, Hunter died, but he revered his former master and was determined to continue his work.

Although hampered by the fact that Sir Everard Home had removed many manuscripts that would have helped to identify the specimens, Clift struggled on, trying to prepare Hunter’s collection for public view. By the 1820s, his experience was considerable. When Gideon Mantell presented him with one of the pointed, curved teeth he had found, Clift did not hesitate: ‘there can be no doubt of its having belonged either to the crocodile or the monitor [lizard]. I know of no animal whose teeth have the lateral ridges so strongly defined.’

From such discussions with Clift and comparisons with Cuvier, Mantell began to think that at least some of the giant bones could be assigned, not to a sea lizard, but to an ancient species of crocodile. He wrote in summer 1821 to a friend, the MP and Fellow of the Royal Society Davies Gilbert, telling him of the giant bones of crocodiles that he had found that spring in the Weald. ‘There can be no hesitation,’ said Mantell confidently, in assigning them to ‘the same unknown species of Crocodile, as discovered at Honfleur and Havre’.

But soon after this, Mary Mantell made a remarkable discovery that did not fit this conclusion. There are several versions of the event; the most plausible recounts that the incident occurred one morning in 1820 or 1821, when Mary was accompanying her husband on his medical rounds. While waiting for him to see his patient, she searched for fossils. As she walked, her eyes were irresistibly drawn to a strange shape in a pile of stones that had been heaped by the side of the road. Picking up the stone, she brushed away the white dust, gently removing any loose rock with her fingers. Gradually a shape emerged never previously seen by human eye. It was very smooth, worn and dark brown, rather like a flattened fragment of a giant tooth.

When she showed her husband, he saw at once that this was something important. ‘Soon after my first discovery of colossal bones,’ he wrote, ‘some teeth of a very remarkable character particularly excited my curiosity for they were wholly unlike any that had previously come under my observation.’ The fragment of tooth was more than an inch long, and shaped into a blunt, grinding surface at the crown. The couple were able to trace the source of the pile of stones to the same quarry in Whiteman’s Green in which Mantell had found the other giant bones. ‘Even the quarrymen, accustomed to collect the remains of fishes, shells and other objects embedded in the rocks,’ he wrote, ‘had not observed fossils of this kind and were not aware of the presence of such teeth in the stone they were constantly breaking for the roads.’

The ‘tooth’ cast all his observations into doubt. He could see that this was not the tooth of a crocodile, for it did not have the sharp, pointed crown essential for a carnivore. It had a broad, flattened grinding surface, supported by thick enamel on one side and with a marked ridge up the middle. This was much more like the tooth of a herbivorous mammal, that had been worn down by constant chewing. ‘The first specimen so entirely resembled the part of the incisor of a large mammal,’ he wrote, ‘that I was much embarrassed to account for its presence in such ancient strata, in which according to all geological experience, no fossil remains of mammal would ever be discovered.’

Although the tooth resembled a herbivorous mammal like a hippopotamus or rhinoceros, such creatures were not supposed to exist in ancient rock. Cuvier’s extinct large mammals such as the mammoth and mastodon had been retrieved from Tertiary deposits. Mantell thought from his correspondence with Etheldred Benett that Weald rocks were much older, from the Secondary period. To suggest that mammals had lived in ancient times was one step beyond anything that naturalists could envisage. As James Parkinson had written, although the time-scale of Creation as outlined in Moses had been questioned, the order of Creation was not in doubt. Parkinson thought it striking that the order of creation as stated in the Scriptures was ‘in close agreement’ with geological evidence: ‘The Creative Power has been exercised with increasing excellence in its objects … the last and highest work appearing to be Man.’ No one had yet challenged the assumption that mammals were created last, when God had prepared the Earth for the higher animals.

This belief informed Mantell’s quest; he did not yet have enough evidence to disregard the huge burden of accepted wisdom. He asked himself, if the owner of the tooth was not a large mammal, then what was it? The tooth did not resemble that of any fish at the Hunterian Museum. It could not come from a turtle; they have no teeth, only horny beaks. No amphibian was known to reach giant proportions. And it certainly was not from a bird – no toothed birds had been reported at this time. By a process of elimination the evidence pointed to a bizarre conclusion: the teeth belonged to a giant herbivorous lizard.

Yet this conclusion made no sense. ‘As no known, existing reptiles are capable of masticating their food I could not venture to assign the tooth in question to a lizard,’ wrote Mantell. A herbivorous reptile that could chew its food like a cow was unheard of. It was a preposterous idea. The experts in London, such as William Clift, were following Georges Cuvier, interpreting the fossil record by analogy to living forms. But there was no modern analogue to such a strange reptile.

Gideon Mantell lacked the one piece of evidence that would have proved the tooth belonged to a reptile: a fossilised jaw. A mammal’s jaw is very distinctive. Even if the teeth are missing, there are differently shaped spaces for the various types of teeth: molars, premolars, incisors and canines. A reptile does not have several types of teeth; although its teeth may vary in size, the sockets are all the same shape. But Mantell could not find a jaw, just a single disembodied tooth.

When he studied the tooth at home, in his drawing-room, surrounded by his collection, in moments of doubt – the large fragment of tooth was so worn – he sometimes wondered if he had found anything at all. Viewed from some directions it was almost unrecognisable as a tooth. Fine, feathery black lines were woven across the surface like a spider’s web. There it lay in his hand, a scrap of a fossil scarcely larger than a pebble, withholding the secret to an unknown past.

During the summer of 1821 Mantell redoubled his efforts to gather any evidence that could shed more light on the mystery. Scarcely interrupted by the major events of the day – the death of Emperor Napoleon on St Helena, the spectacular coronation of the ageing King George IV, the summer races and Brighton fair – he struggled with his geological research whenever time could be spared from his practice. Sometimes he took the single-horse chaise to Cuckfield with his young apprentice, George Rollo; occasionally he rode out alone to hunt for further evidence of his monster.

By the autumn, Mantell’s first-floor rooms were filled with a strange assortment of fragments of giant bones uncovered in the Weald. From his knowledge of anatomy while training as a doctor he was able to identify several of them. He wrote to the Reverend Conybeare at the Geological Society, telling him that he had ‘ribs; clavicle [part of the shoulder]; radius [forearm]; pubis [front part of the pelvis]; ilium [from the side of the pelvis]; femur or thigh bone; tibia or shin bone of the leg; metatarsal bones of the foot; vertebrae forming the back-bone and teeth’. Although the teeth appeared broken off close to the jaw, the jaw itself could not be traced. Some of the bones had features in common and seemed to belong together. Others were so broken and fragile they were impossible to identify. All the bones were hopelessly intermingled with debris from other animals, turtles, fishes, shells and vegetables.

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

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’.

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

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:

The teeth, ribs, and vertebrae of a gigantic animal of the Lizard Tribe.

Bones and plates of several species of Tortoise.

Teeth of a species of Anarhicas [wolf-fish].

Scales of Fishes and Lizards.

Bones of Birds? and of Quadrupeds [unknown]’

In his conclusion, Mantell stated boldly that entombed in the hills of Sussex ‘there are one or more gigantic animals of the Lizard Tribe’.

Although he could not name the creatures or have any clear conception of the kind of beast he was describing, this was the first attempted scientific description of dinosaur remains correctly identified as giant lizards. It was a vivid snapshot of a wondrous unknown past. ‘We know not the millionth part of the wonders of this beautiful world,’ he wrote. ‘It is the pleasing task of the geological inquirer … to discover order and intelligence in scenes of apparent wildness and confusion … to recognise a series of awful but necessary operations by which the harmony, beauty and integrity of the universe are maintained … which must be regarded as wise provisions of the Supreme Cause.’

As he proudly received the first printed copy at the beginning of May 1822, he had high hopes that this would prove a turning-point in his career. ‘I am resolved to make every possible effort to obtain that rank in society to which I feel I am entitled both by my education and my profession,’ he wrote in his journal. Surely, fired by these strange findings, some rich patron would step forward; his endless round of medical duties that took up so much of his time would, perhaps, soon be a thing of the past? At the very least, he hoped that his labours would be well received by the prestigious London societies: the Royal Society and the Geological Society.

Soon after the publication of his book, Mantell took some of his Sussex fossils to a meeting of the Geological Society in Covent Garden. The worn teeth of the giant herbivore were carefully wrapped in cloth. It was a long and tiring journey to London by chaise, stopping several times to change the horses, before he found his way to the House of the Geological Society at 20 Bedford Street. The Reverend William Buckland, now the Vice-President of the Society, had come down from Oxford with his friend the Reverend Conybeare. William Clift, Conservator of the Hunterian Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons, was also present.

Mantell’s diary and his subsequent accounts reveal that after the business of the meeting was completed, he showed these experts some of the worn, brown teeth from his unknown herbivorous animal. ‘I was discouraged by the remark that the teeth were of no particular interest,’ he wrote. The experts did not agree with Mantell that the ‘tooth’ belonged to an ancient herbivorous lizard. Far from such an exotic and fanciful verdict, they claimed: ‘There is little doubt the teeth belonged either to some large fish, allied to “Anarhic[h]as lupus” or wolf-fish, the crowns of whose incisors are of a prismatic form, or were mammalian teeth obtained from a diluvial [recent] deposit.’

Thus the combined wisdom of these august members of the Geological Society was that the tooth on which Mantell had pinned all his hopes belonged to nothing more exotic than a recent mammal such as a rhinoceros or an oversized fish! Mantell felt their dismissive lack of interest keenly. How could anybody build a reputation on a large fish? There was only one person there who dissented from the expert verdict – William Hyde Wollaston – and he happened to be the only person present who was not a geologist.

The scepticism of the experts at the Society stemmed from the fact that they did not accept Mantell’s classification of the strata of the Weald as Secondary rock. His conclusion that he had found a giant herbivorous lizard could be wrong if his interpretation of the Tilgate beds as ancient Secondary rock was incorrect. Numerous mammalian remains had been found in the more recent Tertiary rocks which lay above the Secondary strata: mammoths, elephants, rhinoceros and hippopotamus. If the Weald rocks in Sussex were Tertiary, then the giant fossils within them, far from belonging to some improbable species of herbivorous reptile, were much more likely to be from any of these large mammals. To persuade the experts that he had indeed found an ancient reptile, he had first of all to prove beyond doubt that the Tilgate beds were Secondary rock.

The eminent members pored over the details of Mantell’s findings and tried to fathom whether the limestone and sandstone of the Tilgate Forest were part of the ‘Purbeck’ formation, or ‘Ferruginous sand’, ‘Greensand’, ‘Iron-sand’ or ‘Hastings sand’. Their task was made all the harder since the names for the Sussex strata were not yet standardised and everyone was using different terms for the various layers, adding to the bewilderment. For Mantell, with each learned utterance from the experts the years of painstaking work were falling away, the exotic lizards of mythical proportions fast fading into nothing more than a figment of his imagination. He was just a country doctor, after all.

There was good reason to be confused when trying to place the strata of the Tilgate Forest into the geological sequence. Unlike the Stonesfield rock near Oxford where the fossils were found deeply buried, the rock at Whiteman’s Green in the Weald was inexplicably close to the surface. Was this, as Mantell claimed, a protrusion of older, Secondary rocks? Or was it a recent deposit, perhaps of Tertiary or even younger alluvial rocks, as Buckland thought. In Fossils of the South Downs Mantell made no attempt to conceal his perplexity about the exact position of the strata in which he had found his giant reptiles. Although he had correctly identified the Tilgate Beds as Secondary, he did admit that the precise ‘geological position of these beds [within the Secondary series] is involved in much obscurity and cannot at present be satisfactorily determined’.

Faced with the disbelief of the Geological Society, shortly after this meeting Mantell made yet another survey of the Sussex rocks, this time with his friend Charles Lyell. Riding west from the Tilgate Forest, Lyell and Mantell searched for quarries that contained strata and fossils that matched those found at Whiteman’s Green. They were hoping to find a site where the different layers of rock were clearly exposed in the geological sequence, so they could prove beyond doubt the exact position of the Tilgate Beds within the Secondary series of rocks. If they could convince the experts that the Tilgate rock was Secondary, then surely no one would doubt that Mantell had indeed found an ancient giant lizard?

To Mantell’s delight, they uncovered similar organic remains – bones, teeth and ‘numerous vegetables allied to the Cycas’ – in the sandstone cliffs of Hastings, Rye and Winchelsea. Even better, in a quarry near Rye they found the strata laid bare. Sandstone and limestone matching the Tilgate beds were embedded in the Secondary rock known as Iron-sand.

After this expedition, on 1 June 1822 Mantell wrote triumphantly to Dr William Fitton, the Secretary of the Geological Society: ‘I think we may fairly conclude that the sandstone of Rye, Winchelsea, Hastings, Tilgate Forest and Horsham are but different portions of the same series of deposits belonging to the “Iron-sand” formation.’ Mantell was now completely satisfied that the limestone and sandstone in which he had found the giant bones in the Weald could be placed in the Secondary series, well below the chalk formations. Consequently, in his letter to the Geological Society he went even further. In defiance of the experts such as Buckland, he restated his own interpretation of the animal remains that he had found. The large herbivorous teeth were now clearly identified as ‘Teeth of an unknown Herbivorous Reptile, differing from any hitherto discovered either in a recent or fossil state’. In addition, he confirmed that he had the teeth and bones of a lizard resembling those found at Stonesfield, and ‘Teeth and bones of crocodiles and other Saurian [lizard] animals of an enormous magnitude’. From the evidence of this letter the amateur Gideon Mantell was in no doubt that his beguiling view of a buried ancient world inhabited by several different species of giant reptiles – herbivores and carnivores – was an accurate one.

However, his letter was regarded as of such insignificance by senior members of the Society that it was not even read out, as planned, to the eminent company. For one thing, George Bellas Greenough, a Fellow of the Royal Society, a former MP and the first Chairman and President of the Geological Society, was convinced that iron-sand was always a marine deposit. Since Mantell had reported some freshwater shells mixed in with the giant bones, Greenough insisted that the Tilgate beds could not be iron-sand and refused to change his opinion in the light of Mantell’s findings.

William Buckland, too, was certain that the Weald rock resembled a recent, Tertiary rock he had seen while travelling in Italy and so was not a Secondary stratum. Consequently, in his view, Mantell’s ‘reptiles’ had to be large mammals. And such was the standing of both Buckland and Greenough that other members could not accept that a provincial surgeon could possibly have knowledge that surpassed that of the Oxford and London men who were the leaders in the field.

Over six months elapsed before it was decided that Mantell’s letter to Fitton on the strata of the Tilgate Forest would be read before the Geological Society. The minutes of the meeting on 17 January 1823 show that both Lyell and Mantell were present. At the Council committee meeting the following week, Mantell’s paper was read and passed on to referees to check before publication. However, it remained unpublished for a further three years. The archives reveal that Gideon Mantell had considerable difficulty getting his papers published by the Society. One unsigned letter from a referee considering his paper on fossil vegetables wrote: ‘the notice is not of sufficient importance to be printed’. George Greenough, too, turned down Mantell’s paper on the Tilgate Forest. William Buckland was so convinced that Mantell was wrong, he wrote specifically to warn him against claiming that the teeth and bones were found in ‘the older Iron-sand formation’. Mantell believed this advice came from the best of intentions and commented on ‘the generous kindness that marked his character’.

Mantell’s uphill struggle to get his ideas accepted by the experts was not unique. One amateur geologist, Robert Bakewell, who was not allowed to join the Geological Society although he wrote a popular book, Introduction to Geology, wrote frankly about the difficulties. ‘There is a certain prejudice,’ he said, ‘among the members of the Scientific Societies in London and Paris, which makes them unwilling to believe that persons residing in provincial towns or the country can do anything important for science.’ William Smith, the surveyor who pioneered studies of strata in England and was also not a member, once remarked: ‘the theory of geology was in possession of one class of men [at the Geological Society] and the practice in another’. Gideon Mantell, an amateur from the provinces with none of the trappings of the upper classes, was very much an outsider. The disappointment he felt at the rejection of his ideas, and his failure to obtain recognition for his giant lizards, was recorded in his diary:

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