Copyright

William Collins

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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2018

Text © Brian J. Ford 2018

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Cover image © Natural History Museum, London/Science Photo Library

Brian J. Ford asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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Source ISBN: 9780008218935

Ebook Edition © May 2018 ISBN: 9780008218911

Version: 2019-05-17

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Preface

Chapter 1: Dinosaurs and the Ancients

Chapter 2: Emerging from the Shadows

Chapter 3: The Public Eruption

Chapter 4: Great American Discoveries

Chapter 5: Drifting Continents

Chapter 6: Reptile Dysfunction

Chapter 7: How Microbes Made the World

Chapter 8: Wading with Dinosaurs

Chapter 9: Copulating Colossus

Chapter 10: Truth Will Out

Chapter 11: The Life and Death of Dinosaurs

Notes

Picture Section

Index

About the Author

About the Publisher

Preface

This is the updated, second edition of a book I didn’t want to publish. For decades I deliberated on the giant dinosaurs, pondering as the palæontologists unveiled their findings, and it was obvious that they were getting dinosaurs wrong. I waited for the truth to dawn, but it didn’t happen. The scientific evidence is now clear – the way dinosaurs are explained is incorrect. So this book has a bold and irreverent aim, for it sets out to demolish our present-day orthodoxies and to create a radical new view of how dinosaurs developed and the way they lived their lives. I am also launching a startling theory which shows how we have misunderstood the Cretaceous period, that great era when the gigantic dinosaurs held sway. Our current understanding is fundamentally misconstrued: the environment was different; the climate was different; the landscape was different. Dinosaurs were different. Everything we know about the age of the dinosaurs is misconceived, and producing this book has been the only way to revolutionize this entire scientific discipline. It has been a colossal undertaking.

We are going to travel back in time to see how the development of our planet was determined, how fossils were discovered, and how science started to understand evolution and the way the world became the way it is. As we set out on this extraordinary journey, I would like to thank the many dinosaur specialists around the world who have assisted with advice. Truly, I’d like to very much; but I cannot. None of them helped – instead, every dinosaur expert has attacked this new theory whenever it has appeared (or tried to). Those palæontologists around the world are so very antagonistic to every word within, that you may have pebbles thrown at your windows if one of them spies this book in your room. This iconoclastic review has been the target of bitter hostility and the most vitriolic insults, though my inquiries into dinosaurs were never intended to be about controversy, but simply about debating how those massive monsters evolved and how they lived their remarkable lives.

There is clearly a requirement for a detailed explanation of dinosaur research. As Larry Witham has pointed out: ‘It is bad news to science museums when four in ten Americans believe humans lived with dinosaurs.’1 There is certainly a need for a survey of the whole field, dating back to prehistory, looking at the pioneers and the early discoveries, and following how opinions have changed over the years.

Why did this study of such colossal creatures capture my attention, since I am a biologist preoccupied by the smallest microscopic living organisms – single cells? Dinosaurs were the largest animals ever, and should be far from my central interests. Yet there is a link between monstrous dinosaurs and microscopic cells. In 1993, Dippy the Diplodocus in the Natural History Museum in London had her tail raised. This long tail had rested on the floor since the skeleton was transferred to the entrance hall in 1979, but research had since shown that the tail could not have been like that in life. And so, in 1993 the massive tail was raised aloft, securely supported by stout steel. People looking at the skeleton found themselves imagining the fossil clothed in muscly flesh, the dinosaur sheathed in warty skin as it snarled at visitors. Not me: I always envisioned a minute microscopic muscle inside the tail, each one endlessly burning glucose to provide metabolic energy at a furious rate as it remained resolutely contracted, struggling to hold the heavy tail up against the downward clutch of gravity. No animal evolves to do this: half the dinosaur’s intake of food would be expended by the effort of simply holding the tail up in the air. Try standing erect with your arms held straight out sideways and see how long you manage. That standard view of dinosaurs was impossible. It was the single cell that proved it.

Dinosaurs have long been fantasized about by scientists. Palæontologists have been circulating silly stories about dancing dinosaurs and their complex sex lives and these scientists create complex caricatures of lifestyles that are based on nothing more than wishful thinking or idle guesswork. We need scientific evidence for our statements, and for the present-day theories there is little scientific backing. Every textbook and television documentary ever produced, all the sci-fi movies, newspaper and magazine articles published around the world, and every display in museums and theme parks, all are fundamentally misconstrued. What we have been taught about dinosaurs is wrong.

When I proposed my new theory, it was greeted by a hail of invective. ‘Who the hell …?’ demanded one commentator online; ‘WTF …?’ said another. The theory is ‘a rotting corpse’ and ‘a silly idea’ and reporting this ‘dinosaur nonsense’ is ‘bad science journalism’, while ‘Brian Ford’s wild, ignorant, uninformed speculation’ became the target for a petition signed by palæontologists all around the world and sent to the BBC after they broadcast an interview about it all. ‘The BBC and everyone else who carried this story should be ashamed,’ announced the palæontologists. The BBC carefully considered the petition, and said they felt that ‘Brian Ford was unlikely to be put off by the condemnation of the established experts.’ On that occasion, the BBC was right.

We like to think that revolutionary scientific theories are seized with open arms, but they are usually crushed by conventional conformity. There is a reason. In science you receive your funds for routine research that has a tried-and-tested track record; there is no academic support for something unexpected. Publications in science are subject to peer review, which means that a paper must proceed through a sequence of checks – carried out by the existing authorities in your field – before it is possible to publish. This is a sensible safeguard against an editor (who may know little of the topic) publishing something that’s muddle-headed or wrong. Writers have often said to me that they love the internet, because they can publish whatever they like without the intervention of an editor; believe me, that is why there is so much rubbish on the web. Editors are a scientist’s best friend. They can detect the infelicities that your readers would spot in an instant. I write a regular column in America and my editor in Chicago, Dean Golemis, has an editorial eye eagles would envy. In this book, after all its conventional processing, Golemis corrected dozens of infelicities others had missed. Never edit your own writing!

Yet peer review has a downside. If you are publishing a new theory which says, in essence, that the authorities in your field are heading the wrong way, then obviously they aren’t guaranteed to agree. An iconoclastic new theory is likely to be squashed before it gains currency. Establishment academics need to keep things under control or they lose their authority and, worse still, their funding. Although the opinion of our peers may guard against our publishing hastily, it can also conceal crucial new concepts. Peer review has become the single most pervasive obstacle to revolution in science.

It is also being seized upon as the key to success – not for the academics alone, but for the online community of entrepreneurs. Hundreds of newly invented journals with names conjured up to seem prestigious are being set up around the world. They send dignified missives to eminent professors, inviting them to become editorial advisers, and soon establish an editorial board of great names. The typefaces are chosen for their elegant and refined lines, and four-figure fees are demanded from authors for open-access publication. Apart from the time taken to set up and format the website, the running costs are minimal. Whereas an established scientific journal has high costs for paper and production, and for binding and distribution, these online enterprises have negligible outgoings and almost all the work is done by vain volunteers eager to see their names on the editorial page. The profits to the proprietor are immense. Their key to success lies in the extreme gullibility of scientists, to whom publishing peer-reviewed papers matters more than anything else. This emergent form of scientific publishing is a racket and it is exploiting the naïve vanity of academics and dignifying their hollow enterprise with the touchstone of peer review. Millions are being made every day because of this futile faith in a questionable concept.

Part of the problem is the lack of scientific awareness on the part of the media, which allows outrageous flights of fancy to proceed unchallenged. In any other field of endeavour – sport or politics, economics or art – commentators are quick to pounce on any infelicity and argue the toss with the most eminent of authorities. Politicians can hardly get a word in these days. But in the specialist sciences? The interviewers simply trot along lamely, asking anodyne questions, and allowing duplicitous answers to float away like smoke in summer sunshine, so that the scientist is confident they can say what they want. This is why pictures of imaginary planets feature in specialist magazines and newspapers, and on television, which have no basis whatever in reality. Scientists can get away with anything in this ignorant world, and dinosaur palæontologists have exploited that to the full. Most of what they tell us is fake news, stories spun to perpetuate their income and preserve their mystique.

In this book we will discover the facts about the way new knowledge was nudged from the revelations of research. We will see how philosophers came to realize how the Earth had changed, how the climate had altered, and how scientists came to understand that there had been eras populated by mighty, magnificent monsters. We will see how geology and palæontology were born and shall trace their roots from antiquity. When we consider evolution, we will encounter the hero worship of Charles Darwin – but I will also introduce you to a dozen people who came up with ‘evolution’ long before him. It was not his theory; it will come as a surprise to know that the word ‘evolution’ did not appear anywhere in Darwin’s book when On the Origin of Species was published; neither did the phrase ‘survival of the fittest’ – indeed, that expression was coined by someone else, and not by Charles Darwin. We will look back at the pioneering theories of continental drift proposed by Alfred Wegener and see how the theory of plate tectonics was being rejected in the United States within living memory; and I will surprise you with a dozen investigators who had the idea long before Wegener. The untold stories of the early movies made about dinosaurs also feature in the book, and so do some of the curious novels in which dinosaurs feature prominently. Through all this complex network of developing ideas we can follow the generations of dinosaur hunters and perceive how today’s conventions slowly emerged.

It took centuries before the strange fossilized remains found centuries ago on a beach, or dug out by quarrymen, were recognized for what they were. Yet I believe that the view of dinosaurs which those investigators bequeathed to us is wrong. I am going to demonstrate that the conventional conception of those gargantuan monsters pounding across the prairie, fighting like demons and roaring like banshees, is completely fanciful. I am going to show that the theory of birds as dinosaurs is not a new idea at all (it was first proposed in 1888), and I will show that it is absurd. There are animals very close to dinosaurs in our modern world, but they aren’t anything like birds, any more than a chihuahua is a kind of kitten. You have been told so many times that an asteroid or a meteorite was the cause of the dinosaurs becoming extinct, but we will discover that even this is wrong. That can never have been the case. If so, then all other reptiles – the crocodiles and tortoises, lizards and alligators, turtles and snakes – would have vanished at the same time.

In this book we will see how the names of dinosaurs were derived, and discover something of the times in which they lived. I have set down imperial and metric measurements, though have used ‘ton’ throughout. The ton, short ton and metric ton (or tonne) are all within 10 per cent of each other, and all the estimates of the weight of dinosaurs are approximate, some wildly so; therefore sticking to the single unit is sensible.

Why did I not wish to publish these investigations? My assumption was that some sensible palæontologist, somewhere, would draw the same conclusions; yet they didn’t. It was only when the global community of palæontologists advised on a series of updated television documentaries perpetuating these myths that I finally felt the time had come to say so. Even then I held back and delayed publishing anything. In the event, I announced my own alternative conclusions in a modest magazine article, only to find all my research universally condemned by the entire world of dinosaur palæontology. So, can an individual single voice revolutionize an entire modern scientific discipline? Could one person, in this modern world, challenge a major branch of science and show that all its protagonists are mistaken? Can a single scientist, in any field, still show that everybody else is wrong?

You tell me.

1

Dinosaurs and the Ancients

You cannot escape from dinosaurs. They are everywhere; indeed, you are probably sitting on top of one as you read these words. Fossil dinosaurs are abundant wherever there are Mesozoic sedimentary rocks, and they occur in every continent, even the Antarctic. Everywhere there are books, games, movies and television documentaries; since Sheryl Leach created Barney the Dinosaur in 1992, it has become one of the most famous (or notorious) new cartoon characters, and you can wade through pages of dinosaur toys online. For ten dollars, you can pick up a frightening pair of foam rubber dinosaur claws that, assuming you do not have relatives of a nervous disposition, you may wear like gloves. Dinosaurs dominate the media; indeed, the first popular cartoon character in the history of movies was a dinosaur. It was not Mickey Mouse (who began life as Mortimer), or Betty Boop, or even Felix the Cat. They were all released in the 1920s and 1930s, whereas a dinosaur named Gertie had become the world’s first famous cartoon character in a film that was released before World War I. Gertie was a smiling, endearing sauropod, created by Winsor McCay who had enrolled to study art in Chicago in 1899. He released his movie Gertie the Dinosaur at the Palace Theater, Chicago, on February 8, 1914, and soon it became a nationwide hit. His cartoon character had been drawn from the skeleton of a brontosaur in the American Museum of Natural History (A.M.N.H). I have lectured in that historic venue and have seen those dramatic dinosaur displays. Truly, they are awesome. Gertie was portrayed with vivid realism, with her tail resting on the ground and dragging along behind her, just as you’d expect, much like a present-day crocodile.

A dinosaur named Gertie was the world’s first popular cartoon character, launched in 1914 by Winsor McCay of Chicago. The backgrounds were drawn by John A. Fitzsimmons, and McCay based the dinosaur on popular accounts of a Brontosaurus.

More recently we have seen those stunning digital re-creations in the Jurassic Park movies, where huge sauropod dinosaurs rear up for leaves, standing on their huge hindlegs, then hit the ground with their forelimbs to create an earth-shattering crunch. Disney even released a film about a friendly dinosaur, which had facial musculature unlike that of any reptile and which made doe-eyed expressions of maternal devotion as she smiled affectionately at her young. On television, we have become accustomed to dinosaurs throwing up clouds of dust as they pound across the arid scrub, we have seen a planet populated by dinosaurs, and have watched people walking with them. Yet these are all wrong. The evolution of dinosaurs has been misconstrued. In this book, we will take a new look at the latest evidence about dinosaurs and find that they were very different from everything that you have been told before.

Conventional portrayals of herbivorous dinosaurs show them in a familiar modern landscape, usually in a landscape of desert or scrub. Scientific evidence shows this cannot be the case: they consumed huge amounts of lush vegetation. (http://wallpoper.com/wallpaper/dinosaurs-desert-400302)

The standard books will tell you that the study of dinosaurs began when Sir Richard Owen coined the term in 1842, but dinosaurs were actually discovered thousands of years before that. They even feature in rituals that date back to prehistoric times, and their fossils have been known to scientists for centuries. Although palæontology first became popular in Queen Victoria’s England, more than 1,000 different fossil species had already been identified when she was still a young monarch, long before the word ‘dinosaur’ had even been coined. When the pioneering dinosaur hunters appeared, some were daredevil characters (one of whom is said to have inspired the character of Indiana Jones), others were quiet and modest geologists who hated writing about their discoveries, along with crazy extroverts, thieves and saboteurs, plagiarists and commercial speculators who smuggled skeletons and became wealthy. Many are fantasists, given to wild speculation without a shred of scientific evidence to back it. Since the 1970s dinosaurs have been a hot topic of discussion, and as we shall see, new species are constantly being named. Today, fresh dinosaur sites are being discovered all around the world and we have recorded a total of some 1,850 genera of dinosaurs that lived between 245 and 66 million years ago. Where did this all start? How did we become aware that the Earth had changed – and when did people realize the true nature of fossils?

Palæontologists will tell you that China is a new hotbed of dinosaur discoveries. Research is continually revealing fresh information, and strange unheard-of dinosaurs are being recorded. Of course, this is true; but it is not as new as people say. The Chinese have known about dinosaurs since the Stone Age. The fossilized skeletons were taken as the remains of gigantic monsters, and it is those that gave rise to the legendary depictions of dragons. Dragons were real – they were dinosaurs. Chinese medicine believes in the administration of tinctures from fearsome creatures to heal and invigorate humans. Thus, just as the bones of present-day predators – like brown bears and tigers – have been used for thousands of years in traditional Chinese medicine, so have the bones of mighty dinosaurs. The Chinese for dinosaur is kǒnglóng (恐龍), meaning ‘terrible dragon’, and their existence was written about by Hua Yang Guo Zhi in the Western Jin Dynasty (AD 265–316). Since the fossil remains of dinosaurs showed that they were the most powerful of all creatures, their bones would logically provide the strongest cure. The tradition persists to this day, and many village communities still regard dinosaur skeletons as the remains of real dragons. Reporter Kevin Holden Platt writes that, during a recent palæontological dig in Henan Province headed by Dong Zhiming of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing, Dong told of villagers who were said to be using dragon bones in their homeopathic medicines. When he investigated, he found that the bones they were using were the petrified remains of gigantic sauropod dinosaurs. The tinctures were used to treat dizziness and cramp, and were also applied to help wounds heal.1

In the street markets of today’s China, fossilized teeth and claws of dinosaurs are sold in markets where they are described as being those of dragons. Many families own them, sometimes as curios, sometimes as charms, believing them to be from genuine dragons. Not only did this view persist among the rural communities, but such legends still linger among some city-dwellers. Turn to the chinahighlights website and you will see that their section on dragons begins by reassuring readers that dragons are not actually real.2

To Western eyes this is as absurd as a written reminder that elves and fairies are merely imaginary. Yet this reminds us how powerful are the age-old legends of dragons in Chinese eyes. Western myths about dragons may also have originated from the discovery of huge fossils in Europe, though it is also possible that the legends spread from China along the ancient Silk Road.

Remarkable dinosaur-like creatures can be seen on an ancient seal carved from jasper 5,500 years in present-day Iraq, now in the Louvre in Paris. Such images have led people wrongly to believe that our predecessors were acquainted with dinosaurs.

Chinese traditions tell that it was a dragon that sowed the seed of their race. Thousands of years ago, it is said that a tribal leader, Yandi (炎帝), was born out of his mother’s telepathic communication with a mighty dragon. Huangdi (皇帝 the yellow Emperor) and the dragon launched the prelude to the Chinese people when Yandi became the Emperor’s deputy. So the ancient Chinese took to referring to themselves as originating with Yandi and Huangdi, as well as being descendants of the Chinese dragon. The dragon is first recorded in Chinese archæology in the Xinglongwa culture, which dates back more than 7,000 years. Sites excavated from Liangzhu, and from the Yangshao era in Xi’an, include clay pots bearing dragon motifs, and a Xishuipo burial plot in Puyang from the Yangshao people reveals a skeleton of a human flanked by mosaics made from seashells, with a tiger on one side and a dinosaur dragon on the other. The Chinese were the first to record their impression of dinosaur fossils, though they were not alone.3

From ancient Mesopotamia comes an exquisite seal made some 5,500 years ago that seems to show a dinosaur. It is a small cylindrical seal carved from green jasper and shaped like a barrel, which could be rolled across wax or clay to leave an impression. This example was excavated at Uruk in Mesopotamia (now Iraq) and is in the collections of The Louvre in Paris. Uruk was once a large and advanced civilization for its time, with impressive buildings and a complex hierarchical social structure. The creatures that were engraved into the surface of their seals often represent domesticated or wild animals, though this example is unusual. It seems to have the appearance of a sauropod dinosaur, and could perhaps have been inspired by a fossil. We know that fossils were known to the ancients, because of writings that date back 1,000 years. The Book of Healing (in Arabic: کتاب الشفاء) was written by the Persian philosopher Ibn Sīnā (Persian: ابن سینا), who is known to present-day Western scholars as Avicenna. His is a remarkable book, covering natural history and mathematics, astronomy and even music, and was written between AD 1010 and 1020. The work is not all his, of course; this was meant as a compendium of current knowledge and contains much information from the ancient Greek writers including Aristotle and Ptolemy, together with the findings of other Persian and Arabic writers. He wrote of fossils as if they were familiar objects, and believed that fossilization occurred when subsidence caused the release of a ‘petrifying virtue’ that subtly transformed substances into stone. He felt that there was nothing surprising about this; it was no more remarkable than the ‘transformation of the waters,’ he wrote.

Notions of the movement of the Earth’s surface and changes with geological time were part of the common currency in the ancient Middle East, though they did not emerge in European philosophy until they were expounded by Magnus Albertus, a physician and polymath, born in 1200, who became widely regarded as the greatest German mind of the Middle Ages. He also wrote of fossils, saying that the rocks around Paris were a rich source of ‘shells shaped like the moon’ that were enveloped by viscous mud and were preserved by the ‘dryness of the stone’.4 For centuries in the West, the occurrence of fossilized seashells on raised ground was taken as evidence of the biblical flood.

Travel now across the world to Cambodia, where the Khmer people live, and at Angkor Wat you will find an ancient image of a dinosaur. There is a stegosaur carved into a wall in the temple of Ta Prohm which was constructed on the orders of the god-king Jayavarman VII and was dedicated in AD 1186. Surviving records show that more than 12,000 people lived in the temple compound at its peak, including 18 high priests and 615 dancers, with another 100,000 villagers dwelling nearby, trading with the temple authorities and providing goods, food and services. Carved into the temple walls are numerous symbolic images, and they were protected by being overgrown with jungle vegetation for centuries so that the building, even though penetrated by massive tree roots, escaped being restored by overeager Europeans. The stegosaur carving has been cited by creationists to show that humans were acquainted with living dinosaurs. The likeness, they say, is anatomically correct – but it isn’t. A real Stegosaurus had a small head and a pointed, spiked tail; the carving at Ta Prohm has a distinctive, larger, head and there is no sign of the typical stegosaurian spiked tail. The dorsal plates are vividly carved, but a living stegosaur had two rows of plates that were more numerous than in the carving. This temple decoration was emphatically not carved by someone who had a living dinosaur as the reference for the image. They could, however, have seen petrified remains. The fossil of a Stegosaurus trapped in limestone strata often reveals only one set of dorsal plates, and it is perfectly reasonable to assume that the head (or the tail) was absent. Stegosaurs had proportionately tiny heads, and the skulls of fossilized dinosaurs are usually missing. Partial fossils are far more abundant than complete dinosaur skeletons, and it is easy to see how an ancient sculptor would have invented a head for his carving. Some present-day amateurs claim that the large plates along the back of this carving ‘more closely resemble leaves’ and they try to assert that the Ta Prohm carving is ‘a boar or rhinoceros against a leafy background’. Like so much scholarly speculation about dinosaurs, this is fanciful. The evidence offers nothing to suggest this is right.5

It has even been alleged that there are no stegosaur fossils in Cambodia by which the carving could have been inspired, but this ignores several realities. First, there are stegosaur skeletons all around the world and they are widespread. Political and academic instability for many years led to a failure for palæontology to develop in Cambodia, and important fossil finds are only now being discovered. Cambodia today is not what it once was. The ancient Khmer empire used to occupy part of Thailand and a great swathe of present-day Vietnam and extended up across today’s Laos. All this is an area now known to be rich in dinosaur fossils including Stegosaurus, and fossils have been recorded at Angkor Wat, near the site of the ancient temple. There are plenty of opportunities for that temple stonecarver to have known a well-preserved fossilized stegosaur skeleton, some 700 years before that dinosaur was first revealed to scientists in the Western world.

There is a stegosaur carving at the Ta Prohm temple in Angkor Wat, Cambodia, which opened in 1186 AD. Some commentators have concluded that the plates along the back are ‘leaves’, but a fossilized skeleton may have been the inspiration.

There are other historic representations of a Stegosaurus. We can travel back across the globe and find an example in the legacy of Father Carlos Crespi Croci, born in Italy in 1891. He studied anthropology at the University of Milan, entered the priesthood, and in 1923 he was sent as a missionary to the small city of Cuenca in Ecuador. He worked tirelessly for the indigenous people, establishing an orphanage and school and helping the poor. Croci is commemorated at the church of Maria Auxiliadora in Cuenca by a statue of him assisting a little child. He died in 1982, and the local residents who knew him remember him with great affection. He also attracted global publicity with a series of curious relics, some of them allegedly coming from North Africa, and was surrounded by allegations of fakery and subterfuge. He was the subject of books and television documentaries that argued the case, and many of his objects were exhibited in a museum. A disastrous fire destroyed the building (and many of the artifacts) in 1962, and controversy has persisted ever since over the fate of the treasures that were recovered from the smoking ruins. One item in that collection, however, was a stone carving that does not seem to be a fake. It shows a creature with plates along its back like a stegosaur, and could conceivably have been inspired by a fossilized skeleton.

Fossil dinosaurs were known to the ancient people of South and Central America. When the conquistador Hernán Cortés de Monroy y Pizarro Altamirano, Marquis of the Valley of Oaxaca, and his Spanish troops travelled to explore Mexico in 1519, he was presented, not only with gold and precious stones, but with huge fossilized bones. Missionaries who ventured deep into Ecuador and Peru were shown excavations of fossils, and Georges Cuvier (here) referred to them as evidence of creatures now extinct. When Cortés reached Tlaxcalteca, the elders brought out some huge fossilized limb bones, and Bernal Diaz del Castillo, a captain under Cortés, later wrote about these bones resembling the remains of gigantic humans. He said that one thigh bone (femur) was as tall as a man, which is typical of the femur of a sauropod dinosaur. Diaz recorded that the largest of all the bones was sent in a ship back to Spain for the interest of the king, though there are no current records of where it now might be.

The Ica Stones of Peru, covered with detailed dinosaur carvings, were collected by a doctor who used to purchase them from a farmer, Basilio Uschuya, believing them to be genuine. It later transpired that Uschuya had carved them all himself.

In Mexico you will find a terracotta model reminiscent of an ankylosaur. These tortoise-like dinosaurs lived in the Cretaceous period between 68 and 66 million years ago, and ranged between the size of a tortoise and a small car. Fossils have been found by palæontologists in America and they are very similar to the terracotta model. This curious artifact is approximately 2,000 years old and was made by the artisans of the Jalisco culture, who flourished along the Pacific west coast of Mexico. Stegosaur-like models were also discovered by an expatriate German merchant named Waldemar Julsrud in Acámbaro, Mexico, in July 1944 while out riding his horse. By chance, he spotted some rock carvings and eventually uncovered a range of clay figurines. Julsrud was conversant with Aztec, Toltec, Mayan and Inca artifacts and recorded that these seemed to be different. Julsrud agreed to hire a Mexican farmer, Odilon Tinajero, to dig in the area and offered to pay him one peso (then worth about 12 US cents) for each object he found. Within weeks, he had piles of these figurines.6

Among the models were depictions of stegosaurs and some other dinosaurs. Eventually more than 30,000 of the artifacts were excavated. Considerable controversy surrounded these objects, and scientists dated them using thermoluminescence. These results suggested that they were 4,500 years old, though more recent investigations have claimed that the results were inaccurate, and authorities now insist that the objects are fakes dating from the 1930s. These items were given a museum of their own, and it is open to this day. Most people regard the clay figures as curious fakes,7 though others are convinced that the original dating experiments are valid, and that these are prehistoric relics from an ancient Mexican civilization. There is also a vociferous cohort of enthusiastic supporters of the view that dinosaurs and humans coexisted, and, to these people, the figurines provide the evidence they seek.8

There are other intriguing images that depict humans and dinosaurs together, and some of the carvings from Ica, south of Lima in Peru, even show dinosaurs attacking a human hunter. The images are cut into the surface of volcanic rock of what we now call Ica Stones, rounded nodules of andesite measuring less than 1 foot (30 cm) across. Andesite is a stony mineral that can easily be carved, and these stones purport to depict pre-Columbian scenes and bear symbols from the ancient Inca, Paracas, Nazca and Tiwanaku peoples, as well as the Ica. In the 1930s a Peruvian doctor named Darquea began to collect beautifully carved stones from the town of Ica. His son, Javier Cabrera Darquea, was fascinated by the delicate carvings and began a quest for more. He based his collection on 350 Ica Stones purchased from Carlos and Pablo Soldi, brothers who marketed pre-Columbian artifacts to archæologists and collectors. Through them Javier Darquea met a farmer, Basilio Uschuya, who sold him stones at regular intervals until he had amassed a collection of some 11,000 different examples. He published a book on the message of the stones of Ica, and went on to establish a museum to display some of his impressive collection.9

Dinosaurs fired from clay were found by Waldemar Julsrud in Acámbaro, Mexico, in July 1944. He thought they were from the preclassical Chupicuaro Culture (about 2,000 years ago), but they proved to be forgeries made by a farmer, Odilon Tinajero.

The museum is still there, featuring a range of unmistakable dinosaurs, and many visitors leave impressed by his claims that humans are at least 400 million years old. However, any claim that the artifacts might be authentic disappeared when Uschuya finally conceded that the carvings were fakes. He and a farming friend, Irma Gutierrez de Aparcana, admitted that they had forged the images by copying dinosaur pictures from comics and magazines. A BBC television crew were said to have visited the farmers and paid Uschuya to produce an Ica Stone while they filmed. He cut the patterns with a dentist’s drill and then gave the rock an authentic-looking patina by baking it in cow dung. Many people wondered why he had owned up, but the Peruvian authorities at the time were beginning to enforce the regulated marketing of pre-Columbian artifacts, and – if Uschuya had truly been selling genuine relics – he could have been arrested and put on trial. Conceding that they were fakes was his guarantee against prosecution. Basilio Uschuya was quoted as saying, ‘Carving stones is an easier way of making a living than farming the land,’ while Ken Feder, author of a 2010 book on dubious archæology, wrote: ‘The Ica Stones are not the most sophisticated of the archæological hoaxes, but they certainly rank up there as the most preposterous.’10 It would have been an easy matter to resolve: the microscope would show in an instant whether the images had been engraved by a primitive tool or cut with a dentist’s drill, and microchemical analysis would as easily detect the presence of cow manure on the surface of a stone.

Some similar examples have not been dismissed as fakes. In 1971, at Girifalco in Calabria, southern Italy, a landslip after a 20-hour deluge revealed a cache of artifacts from of a pre-Greek civilization. A lawyer named Mario Tolone Azzariti reported that he had found some terracotta statues, one of which was a model very like a stegosaur. It measures some 7 inches (18 cm) long and shows solid, strong legs (different from those of a present-day lizard). This seems to be a relic of the Stone Age – though I am not aware that it has ever been dated – and may well be the result of inspiration by a fossilized Stegosaurus.

In 1971 in southern Italy, a lawyer named Mario Tolone Azzariti claimed to have found terracotta models, one of which was a like a stegosaur. It measures 7 inches (18 cm) long. Perhaps this was inspired by a fossilized skeleton.

The indigenous peoples of the U.S. knew about fossil dinosaurs for thousands of years. There is an ancient saga among the Delaware people, who inhabited what became New Jersey and Pennsylvania, telling of a party of hunters who returned to their village with a huge, ancient bone which they said had come from a massive monster. This fearsome creature was said to massacre people. A ritual was developed, involving burning tobacco with small fragments of this massive bone, hoping that this would ensure safety from the monster, good hunting for the future, and a long life for all. Fossils found in the area include a range of dinosaurs that we shall encounter later, including Cœlosaurus, Dryptosaurus, Ankylosaurus and Hadrosaurus (subsequently, a hadrosaur was to become the first dinosaur ever to be scientifically investigated in America). As we shall discover later, the Cheyenne people taught that a mythical animal named Ahke once lived in the prairies. These were gigantic god-like bison whose remains had been turned into stone. It seems likely that fossils of the horned dinosaur Triceratops were known since ancient times, and these gave birth to the legend.

Just as the indigenous inhabitants of North America maintain a culture that dates back to prehistory, Stone-Age traditions are also perpetuated by Australian Aborigines. They too have ancient legends about dinosaurs – though there are no fossilized bones to be found. Their dreamtime stories stem from an abundance of dinosaur footprints, notably in northwestern Australia. There are extensive exposures of sandstone on the Dampier Peninsula in the Kimberley region, where innumerable dinosaur footprints are to be found. There are extensive trackways that stretch from Roebuck Bay near Broome north to Cape Leveque; that’s at least 125 miles (200 km). The culture extends inland for at least 100 miles (160 km) across the scrub. So important are these finds that a great swathe of intertidal coastline along the Dampier Peninsula coastline has recently been declared a heritage site.11

The 130-million-year-old rocky strata along the beach, known to geologists as the Broome Sandstone, are marked with countless footprints of three-toed dinosaurs, and these clear tracks have played a part in the local culture for thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of years. The strange footprints in these tracks are clearly recorded in their local legends.12

Australian indigenous people everywhere have an oral culture featuring song cycles that trace in chanted refrains the paths taken by gigantic supernatural beings. Everything in nature is denoted by a specific song – features of the landscape, creatures of the wild, life-sustaining and medicinal flowers, and the stars in the sky – all perpetuating the tradition that existence was predicated upon the legends in these songs.13

The care of both the song cycles and the land – known as Country – rests in the hands of custodians they call Maja, who are selected from the community not because of possessions or family connections, as is common in the West, but purely because of their wisdom and personality. There are different songlines in different places; along the Dampier Peninsula coast they are called ululong, whereas the song cycle that extends east is dabber dabber goon, which reaches past Uluru (which we used to call Ayer’s Rock) and on to Australia’s Pacific coast. At the core of these ancient songs is a mystical being known as Marala, a spirit that laid down the law and established the codes of conduct and morality. The legends about Marala are endless; many of them have been documented by anthropologists, though most remain secret among the tribes and are never vouchsafed to outsiders. One of the songs tells about Marala fighting with Warragunna, the eagle-man, and goes on for hours. Now, it is tempting to dismiss all this as the stuff of legend; as the wild imaginings of a religious people who are now out of their time. Yet their religion has a lot more going for it than any of ours, for they have physical evidence. Marala is a gigantic emu man, and you can see precisely where he walked. There, in the rocks, are the three-toed footprints. There are even some stony giants, weathered in the fierce Sun, that look like petrified monsters. The Aboriginals even know where Marala sat down with Warragunna, because there are the signs of the eagle-man’s feathers clearly preserved in the solid rock. We, with our palæontological insights, know that the footprints of the emu man Marala are actually those of a huge three-toed dinosaur named Megalosauropus. We can also confidently conclude that the feathery impressions of that gigantic eagle are really the fossilized remains of bennettitalean plants, related to the present-day cycads from which we obtain sago, for those leaves really do look like the feathers of a gigantic eagle. The thought processes of Aboriginal people are very different to ours and are hard to follow. A statement by an Aboriginal elder named Lulu from the Gularabulu tribe of the Nyikina people, an ancient community that still lives in the Stone-Age traditions, stated that: ‘The Country now comes from Bugarri-Garriand [dreamtime] and it was made by all the dreamtime ancestors, who left their tracks and statues behind and gave us our law. We still follow that law, which tells us how to look after the Country and how to keep it alive.’14

So here we have an entire way of life and an ancient culture that are based on detailed knowledge of dinosaur footprints and the fossilized remains of Cretaceous plants. Australian Aborigines know their Country intimately, and knew about the remains left by prehistoric monstrous beings thousands of years earlier than we did in the West. The authorities now take these remains seriously. In 2000, an Aborigine from Broome named Michael Latham admitted cutting stegosaur footprints from the sandstone strata, when the tide was low, using an angle-grinder. He was jailed for two years.

The first records from Europeans about the Australian dinosaur tracks were written around 1900 when an immigrant from Ireland, Daisy Bates, spent three months on a mission station in Aboriginal territory. She later returned to the Roebuck Plains Station with her husband and son, and devoted herself to a study of the indigenous coastal communities. She observed many of the areas where footprints were visible. Then, in 1935, Catherine Milner and her young twin daughters discovered some on their own. They wrote later that they had come across the footprints one morning when the tide was low, and they had looked as if ‘whatever had made them had just passed by, so clear and perfect they were.’ Little wonder the tracks were regarded by the Aboriginal people as clear evidence of events.15

The only fossilized remains of actual dinosaurs in Australia are of occasional scattered bones and teeth; yet there is now a growing understanding of the variety of the dinosaur population derived from the fossilized trackways set in stone. They are usually left undisturbed for visitors to enjoy, though this inevitably exposes them to damage. Trackways left by theropod dinosaurs were discovered at the eastern side of Australia when palæontologists first discovered the footprints of a theropod dinosaur in tidal strata at Flat Rocks, Victoria, in 2006. Thousands of scattered bones and teeth have been found in the area, and the dinosaur footprints – measuring about 1 foot (30 cm) across – were left intact for visitors; however, there was no sign pointing them out. In December 2017 someone took a hammer and chisel and chopped out the toes, leaving them scattered nearby. The local Park Ranger, Brian Martin, said: ‘They would need to know exactly where it is to find it. Most people quite easily walk right past it,’ he said. This time the vandals didn’t.

We are beginning to understand how huge some of these monsters were. The massive brachiosaurs which appear so frequently in documentaries and pictures about dinosaurs were colossal creatures measuring about 85 feet (26 metres) long and weighing at least 50 tons, their footprints measuring less than 3 feet (90 cm) in length. Similarly, some unprecedently gigantic footprints were discovered in Mongolia in 2016, each measuring 3 feet 6 inches (1.06 metres) long, which caused considerable surprise among palæontologists. There are Australian huge dinosaur footprints that measure 5 feet 7 inches (1.7 metres) from heel to toe. Nothing so vast has ever been discovered elsewhere.16

Fossilized shells had been known for centuries and, as we have seen, they were conventionally interpreted as a natural consequence of the biblical flood. They were written about as radical new thinkers appeared on the European scene, and they caught the attention of Leonardo da Vinci around 1508, two centuries before the Enlightenment. Leonardo was not inclined to believe that they were the aftermath of the biblical accounts of the Noahic flood. Instead, he thought that their presence showed that the surface of the Earth had changed over time, and the fossilized remains represented an earlier, watery phase of the Earth’s ancient history. A generation later, a French Huguenot hydraulics engineer and ceramicist named Bernard Palissy wrote on the origins of fossils. He too believed that they were not the result of a flood, but had formed naturally in a manner reminiscent of that recorded by Avicenna. Palissy thought that mineral-rich water developed ‘congelative properties’ that transformed once-living creatures to stone. The first report of fossilized bones in Europe dates from 1605, when a British expatriate theologian named Richard Verstegan (living in Antwerp) became interested in fossils and, for the first time, recognized bones and teeth for what they were.17

Verstegan portrayed ichthyosaur vertebræ in a book, though he interpreted them as the remains of fish, which he took as evidence that Britain and mainland Europe were once connected.18

Fossils were collected by many enthusiasts during this period, though the first time they were scientifically described was by Robert Hooke in 1665. Hooke was a remarkable polymath and is best known for his role as the founding father of the science of the microscope. In his large folio volume Micrographia, published in 1665, Hooke devoted a section to fossils. His microscope showed him that fossilized wood had a structure identical to that of wood taken from a tree nearby, and he described the fossil in terms that fit perfectly with our modern understanding.

Hooke also featured a fine image of the microscopic spheres that comprise limestone. His drawing, captioned ‘Kettering-stone’, was described in his text: ‘This stone is brought from Kettering in Northampton-shire, and digg’d out of a Quarry, as I am inform’d.’19

His specimen was demonstrated to the Fellows of the Royal Society on Sunday, April 15, 1663, and attracted much attention. That was an auspicious date; his other demonstration that day was of thin sections of cork. Hooke observed that the specimen (from a wine bottle) showed itself to comprise numerous small boxes, the cell walls of the cork. The room-like nature of each component led Hooke to call them ‘cells’ – and this is the term that has come down to us today for all the cells that we see in living organisms.20

British philosopher Robert Hooke announced the first reasoned account of the process of fossilization in his book Micrographia, published in 1665. He thought that organic remains became filled with ‘stony particles’ and thus became petrified.

There were other fossils in the Royal Society collections at the time, and examples ranging from fossilized teeth to skeletons of fish were included in the Society’s catalogue of rarities, with descriptions showing that the petrification of organic remains was understood as a natural process.21

Under his microscope, Hooke could study the fractured surface of this Middle Jurassic oolite rock. He was the first to make detailed studies of rock formations and his conclusions about the processes of fossilization proved to be influential.

The collecting of fossils soon became a popular hobby for the learned classes. In 1695 John Woodward was appointed the first Professor of Geology at Cambridge University. He recognized the widespread occurrence of fossils and taught that they had been laid down by floods to form successive strata. Woodward became an avid collector of fossils and minerals, and eventually amassed over 9,000 specimens. He donated them all to the University, where they became the nucleus of what later became the Sedgwick Museum. In 1699 Edward Lhuyd published accurate engravings of ichthyosaur bones, vertebræ and limb elements in a book along with fossilized shark’s teeth and sea urchins, and a variety of petrified seashells and ferns.22

Lhuyd was appointed assistant to Robert Plot, a graduate of Magdalen Hall, Oxford, who had been appointed Professor of Chemistry and the first Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum in March 1683. It was Plot who published the first book to feature a picture of a dinosaur bone, The Natural History of Oxfordshire,23 in June 1677. He did not know what it was, and believed it to be a fossilized thigh-bone from a biblical giant, though it looked like a fossilized scrotum. Lhuyd went on to succeed Plot as Keeper.

Nehemiah Grew published pictures including ‘Animal Bodies Petrify’d’ as table 19 in the book Musæum Regalis Societatis, or, A catalogue and description of the Natural and Artificial Rarities …, which the Royal Society published in 1681.

By the end of the seventeenth century, popular fossil finds were becoming more familiar in Britain and many had been well documented. In Switzerland, as in England, fossilized bones were always assumed to be human, and so when naturalist Johann Jakob Scheuchzer described two ichthyosaur vertebræ in 1708 he identified them as being the mortal remains of a person who had been drowned in the biblical flood and named them Homo diluvia tristis testi (‘sad evidence of man in the floods’).

In 1697 Edward Lhuyd engraved his pioneering studies of fossils, and was encouraged by John Ray to publish them. Failing to find a publisher, he solicited subscribers and eventually had enough money to publish Lithophylacii Brittannici Ichnographia in 1699.

Robert Darwin, ancestor of Charles, discovered this skeleton of Plesiosaurus dolichodeirus in 1718. It was displayed in the local vicarage as the bones of a sinner who had died in the great flood, before Darwin recognized it as a fossil.

Then, in 1719, palæontology was quietly born. A clergyman scientist named William Stukeley, a studious man from a legal family, set out for the first time to develop the systematic study of archæological remains. Stukeley came from Holbeach, in Lincolnshire, and was a friend of Isaac Newton. Because of his scientific accomplishments, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society and in 1718 became the first Secretary of the Society of Antiquaries in London. The great English prehistoric monuments at Avebury and Stonehenge had long been sites of cultural interest, and indeed Stukeley himself was fascinated by the Druids, but neither site had been academically investigated until Stukeley showed interest in their origins. He examined them systematically, and this is how he came to be regarded as a father of archæology. In 1718 Stukeley visited the Reverend John South, Rector of Elston, near Newark on the boundary with Nottinghamshire, some 50 miles (80 km) from his home. In the nearby quarries of Fulbeck, Blue Lias rock was being mined and a fossil plesiosaur came to light. It was taken home by South, and became known locally as the Elston crocodile. The owner of Elston Hall was Robert Darwin, himself an FRS, and destined to become the great-grandfather of Charles Darwin. It was hoped that Stukeley could examine the ancient skeleton and find out more about it. Stukeley’s account of the discovery is meticulous:

There are Sixteen Vertebræ of the Back and Loyns very plain and distinct, with their Processes and intermediate Cartilages, Nine whole or partial Ribs of the Left-side, the Os Sacrum, Ilium in situ, and two Thigh-Bones displac’d a little, the Beginnings of the Tibia and Fibula of the Right-Leg; on one Corner there seem to be the Vestigia of a Foot with four of the five Toes, and a little way off an entire Toe, now left perfect in the Stone – there are no less than Eleven Joints of the Tail, and the Cartilages between them of a White Colour distinguishable from the rest. Sir Hans Sloan has a Fish-Sceleton, amongst his immense Treasure of Curiosities, found near this Place, given by the Duke of Rutland.

Left: When Johann Jakob Scheuchzer of Zürich was shown this fossilized salamander, he believed it to be the remains of a preserved human victim of the Noahic flood. It is in the collections of the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin.

Right: Scheuchzer’s published account, Homo diluvii testis (A Flood Man), appeared in 1726. Conventional interpretations of these fossils (like Robert Darwin’s ‘Elston crocodile’) were taken as tangible evidence of biblical realities.

Stukeley discussed all this with his Royal Society friends, and his curious specimen was taken to London for inspection by the Fellows. An account of the discovery was presented to a meeting of the Fellows by Robert Darwin on December 11, 1718, and Stukeley was subsequently invited to publish a formal account in the Society’s journal. This was the first scientific description of a prehistoric reptile skeleton, which in 1824 was named Plesiosaurus dolichodeirus, and today the remains are on display at the Natural History Museum in London. Stukeley’s paper was a landmark; the era of palæontology was beginning to dawn.24

The swiss naturalist, Johann Scheuchzer, wrote extensively of his travels and also commented on fossils. He was shown a remarkable relic, a clearly preserved skeleton excavated from a quarry in Baden, and published it in 1726. Scheuchzer’s interpretation, just as we would expect at the time, was that this represented a human victim of the flood, trapped forever in its stony embrace and preserved for modern man to contemplate his fleeting fate on Earth.25

Twenty years later, the first vertebrate fossils to be excavated in the U.S. were discovered by Charles III Le Moyne, the second Baron de Longueuil, when he was exploring the course of the Ohio River in 1739. Le Moyne, who later became Governor of Montreal, had an active military career fighting against both the British and the Iroquois, and did much exploring for the burgeoning fur trade. This part of the Ohio River is swampy, rich with lush vegetation and dotted with mineral pools and hot springs that bubble from the strata seams beneath. Near the river bank Le Moyne discovered some huge bones. Nobody knew what they were, though eventually they were identified as belonging to a mammoth. For decades, the fossils that Le Moyne excavated were known simply as the ‘Ohio Animal’. The site in Kentucky is now open to the public as Big Bone Lick State Park, and the welcome signs today proclaim it as the ‘Birthplace of American Vertebrate Paleontology’. The bones excavated from this region are far more recent than dinosaurs; those magnificent monsters existed between 250 and 66 million years ago, whereas the mammalian fossils Le Moyne had found are less than 80,000 years old, and some date back only 12,000 years.26

These became the first American fossils to be formally described when Jean-Étienne Guettard published a summary of recent discoveries in palæontology. Guettard would become one of the pioneers of this emergent discipline.27

In 1780 Guettard went on to publish the first mineralogical map of France, which delineated where valuable resources might be found, and which was the first publication to demonstrate the volcanic origins of the Auvergne district of central France. The book also included maps of sites of interest to fossil collectors and was recognized as a pioneering publication in the emerging science of geology.28

Meanwhile, in England in 1755, a naturalist in Oxford named Joshua Platt made a momentous discovery: three ‘enormous’ vertebræ and then a femur that, when freed from the surrounding rock, weighed 220 pounds (100 kg). Platt had a lifelong interest in fossils, and at the time was studying the nature of belemnites. Colossal bones were not something he had previously experienced, so he sent them on to a Quaker botanist, Peter Collison, who was known for his broad interests in natural history and traded with America. Nothing more was done to investigate them – and the specimens have since disappeared. Fossils were attracting a wider audience and, when his paper on belemnites was published in 1764, Platt began with these words:

The public hath of late been agreeably entertained with description of many curious Fossils, discovered in different parts of this kingdom; but very little hath been offered with a view to ascertain their origin and formation; a point of much greater importance to a curious mind, than the most accurate descriptions, or the neatest delineations.

This was a key point: describing fossils was all very well, and drawing them, though intrinsically useful, did not reveal what they actually were. For his paper, Platt broke open the belemnites and neatly described what he found within. This was a pioneering attempt to explore the anatomy of fossils, a discipline that became a mainstay of palæontology in the centuries that followed.29

Another important discovery was made in England in 1766 when an ichthyosaur jaw bearing teeth was discovered in strata at Weston, near Bath. It was exhibited as the bones of a crocodile by the Society for Promoting Natural History in 1783; meanwhile, more ichthyosaur fossils were included in the plates for a book by John Walcott published in 1779.30

The huge skull of a mosasaur was excavated in St. Pietersberg, near Maastricht in the Netherlands, and was later given the name of Mosasaurus hoffmanni. This fanciful portrayal of the event was engraved in 1799 by G.R. Levillaire.

It was in 1764 that European scholars first encountered a dinosaur skull, though nobody realized its significance. This specimen had been dug out of a chalk mine by quarrymen at St Pietersberg, near Maastricht in the Netherlands, and took the form of fragments of jaws with rows of fearsome teeth which were assumed to be the remains of a crocodile. Two years later it was purchased from the miners as a curiosity by Lieutenant Jean Baptiste Drouin; Martinus van Marum, who had opened the Teylers Museum in Haarlem in 1784, subsequently acquired it as a highlight of the museum’s displays, and in 1790 he published a description of it as ‘a large fish skull’.31

Pieter Harting published this engraving as the ‘Jaws of the Mosasaur’ in his book Album der Natuur in 1866. The original fossil was captured by the French in 1795 and taken to the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris, where it may still be found.

A second, similar, skull was excavated a few years later, on nearby land owned by Canon Theodorus Joannes Godding. He displayed it in his home as a curiosity until it was seen by a retired army doctor, Johann Leonard Hoffmann. Hoffmann was a keen fossil collector and decided this must be the skull of a crocodile. A friend of Hoffmann’s was the collector Drouin, and together they concurred that the remains were again those of a crocodile – or possibly a whale. French revolutionary forces under Napoleon occupied Maastricht in 1794, and this fossil was traded for 600 bottles of wine and taken as a trophy straight to Paris. Philosophers conventionally interpreted these petrified remains as coming from familiar creatures, and fossils were widely discussed by learned naturalists. Nobody imagined that fossils might be the remains of long-forgotten creatures, unknown to present-day scholarship, which had roamed the Earth in prehistoric times. It was assumed that the world then was much the same as the world of the past, though there was growing evidence that the Earth had changed over time. As long ago as 300 BC Aristotle’s young protégé Theophrastus had written a work entitled Peri Lithon (‘concerning stones’), which is the earliest work we know of that dealt with rocks. Theophrastus also noted that the draining of coastal swamps had rendered an entire area prone to freezing. He was also a pioneer of climate change, calculating that forest clearance resulted in warmer weather, because more heat could now reach the ground.32

The novel notion that the Earth could change over time was slowly emerging. A United Nations report quotes Vitruvius from around 50 BC, who recorded that many ancient settlements along the Anatolian peninsula in the Aegean Sea had been engulfed when changes in the landscape caused the sea to encroach. This is the first known record of major changes in the Earth’s surface. We now know that there are many ancient cities at the bottom of the sea – one in the Bay of Cambay, India, dates back 10,000 years, and there is another vast city on the bed of the Yucatán Channel near Cuba.33

Georges Cuvier published this refined engraving as ‘The Mosasaurus of Maastricht, Huge skull found in a quarry at Fort St Peter near Maastricht, Netherlands, in 1780’ in his book The Animal Kingdom published in London by Whitaker & Co, 1830.

Another idea that was slowly emerging was that the prehistoric climate had also changed over time. The evidence first emerged from the remote villages of Switzerland, where the local people used to say that the gigantic boulders they found scattered along the valleys were signs that glaciers had once extended further down from the mountains. Pierre Martel, an engineer from Geneva, visited these villages in 1742 and later wrote about these stories. Perhaps the landscape and the climate had once been very different. At the time, this was an unpalatable prospect.34

At about the same time, a Swedish mining engineer, Daniel Tilas, was studying the erratic boulders in many of the Scandinavian countries and the nations bordering the Baltic Sea, and he similarly speculated that they were brought to their present positions by glaciers that had existed in the past.35

Matters were about to change with the revolutionary ideas of James Hutton, a Scottish farmer turned naturalist. Hutton had lectured on the structure of the Earth, and in 1785 he presented his findings in a lecture to the Royal Society of Edinburgh. He argued that many rocks were not original, primeval structures, but had been modified and subject to sedimentation and later to weathering. Hutton introduced a basic principle of modern geology, somewhat clumsily termed uniformitarianism, which states that the natural forces that we see operating on the landscape today are essentially the same as those operated in past æons. He concluded that the movement of rocks by prehistoric glaciers, like the progressive erosion of the coast, was the cause of the landscape around us. Geology was suddenly seen as relevant to the study of the present-day Earth.

A replica of the original fossil from which the previous illustration was taken is on display in the Natural History Museum, London. The original specimen remains for the time being in the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris.

The term ‘geology’ had first been used by Ulisse Aldrovandi in his will of 1603, and came from the Greek γῆ (gē, earth) and λoγία (logia, study). Not until Hutton, however, was the subject given proper scrutiny and set on a firm scientific footing. Hutton used his principle of uniformitarianism to argue that many of the features of the present-day rocky landscape had begun at the bottom of the oceans, that many forms of rock had been produced by collections of ‘loose or incoherent materials’, and that these rocky layers were subject to rising, or falling, over the passage of immense periods of time. This was the first time anyone had put together the ideas fundamental to geology. In 1795, he finally published a book on his conclusions, and the new science of geology was firmly established.36

Several years after Hutton’s work, a Swiss hunter, Jean-Pierre Perraudin, decided to look further into the massive granite boulders that lay scattered around his home in the Alpine village of Lourtier. Perraudin was a professional hunter of chamois, the pretty mountain goats from which the finest leather is obtained. As he hiked across the mountains, he noticed two key facts: not only were there massive granite rocks scattered across the valley floor, but they were very different from the rocks nearby. They didn’t belong there. Secondly, he kept coming across deep longitudinal scratches and grooves carved into the valley sides. He sensibly concluded that this could mean only one thing – just as the villagers had always believed, glaciers had filled the valley in the past and had carried the boulders along, so it was these that had cut the deep grooves into the valley sides. Whenever an explanation for these curiosities had been sought in the past, philosophers said they were the evidence of the biblical flood, but Perraudin dismissed this as nonsense – he was certain that rising flood water could not move granite boulders. In 1815 he went to present his reasoned conclusions to Jean de Charpentier, born in Saxony and an enthusiast for geology, but Charpentier dismissed the idea as absurd. Undeterred, Perraudin raised the matter with a visiting engineer Ignaz Venetz, who lived in the nearby Rhône Valley, and the evidence he presented was so convincing that Venetz himself approached Charpentier and finally convinced him that the theory was right.37

Venetz worked further on the theory, and became convinced that – just as the hunter Perraudin had concluded – there had been eras in the past where glaciers had existed, and they had left indelible marks on the present-day landscape. He claimed that this proved that much of Europe had previously been covered with vast glaciers. At last it was becoming acceptable to say that the world’s climate truly had changed over time.38

Interest in this subject soon came to the attention of a physician and amateur geologist, Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz. He was born in 1807 in Môtier, in the French-speaking part of Switzerland, and qualified in Munich, Germany. He was soon to develop an interest in palæontology and he later studied in Paris under Georges Cuvier, who was greatly impressed by Agassiz’s growing knowledge of fossil fish. When Cuvier died, Agassiz saw himself as his natural successor, and later wrote an extensive work on fossil fish.39

As he developed his spare-time interests in natural history, Agassiz used to discuss his ideas with Karl Friedrich Schimper, a botanist turned poet and four years his senior. Schimper was a firm believer in the idea that prehistoric glaciation had created the landscape they saw around them, and he persuaded Agassiz that the views of Martel and, more recently, Perraudin, provided the evidence. Louis Agassiz devoted much of his free time to tracing changes in the Alps, monitoring snowfall and recording temperatures, and eventually he published an extensive monograph on glaciation. The title page of his book bears a vivid engraving of a glacier towering high above forest trees, and much of the contents comprises a comprehensive collection of detailed climatological tables.40

Agassiz owed his inspiration to Schimper, and to those who preceded him. Scholars have drawn attention to the way in which Agassiz not only failed to give them due credit, but sought actively to conceal it. In 1846, confident that his international reputation was assured, and that his mentors had been eclipsed, Agassiz emigrated to the U.S. and spent the rest of his life as a professor at Harvard.41

Since the revelations in the Alps that Pierre Martel documented more than 270 years ago, we have come to accept the occurrence of ice ages.

We have not always reached the right conclusions. Just 40 years ago, instead of the warmer world we are currently experiencing, people were heralding a new ice age by the end of the last millennium. Global cooling, not warming, was the threat that the public were warned about. Two of my friends wrote books prophesying an era of intense cold. In 1976 John Gribbin published Forecasts, Famines and Freezing and Nigel Calder wrote The Weather Machine and the Threat of Ice. Both confidently assured their readers that we were about to plunge into a new ice age and told how in the temperate latitudes we would need to retreat below the surface to create insulated, habitable cities in order to survive an icy future.42

Calder’s book followed a mammoth BBC television documentary in which he warned us that an ice age was imminent. However, a survey of all the scientific publications on climate in the 1970s shows that only 10 per cent upheld the idea of a new ice age. Even then, most academic opinion was beginning to point to the era we are now experiencing – a time of rising temperatures.43 Most papers were typified by one in Science in 1975, in which Wally Broecker coined the term ‘global warming’.44

This prediction can be traced back to the Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius, who discovered the relationship between carbon dioxide in the air and the temperature of the atmosphere as long ago as 1896.45 Arrhenius followed this in 1908 with a book in which he suggested that we should expect a gradual warming of our world. He calculated that a doubling of the CO2 in the atmosphere would raise Earth’s average temperature by about 10°F (5–6°C) – an estimate still used by many researchers today.46

Between 1938 and 1957 a British engineer named Guy Callendar published a series of 26 papers that set out to relate the atmospheric increase in CO2 to rising temperatures. Then in 1953 Canadian physicist Gilbert Plass reviewed Callendar’s results and calculated that, if the concentration of atmospheric CO2 were to double, the global temperature would rise by about 7°F (3–4°C). This was a meticulous and important paper, but it was ignored by scientists. Plass was a professor at Texas A&M University when writing his paper and, because his university was regarded as undistinguished, his crucial conclusions were ignored. Academic snobbery drowned his prescient proposal.47

For those who want to see more of the way in which those pioneering investigations of climate change have matured into today’s concerns, the most authoritative book on the subject is the splendid volume Experimenting on a Small Planet by William Hay, Professor Emeritus at the University of Colorado in Boulder.48 The first edition appeared in 2013 and runs to some 1,000 pages. It tells a curious story and is excellent bedtime reading, although, as we know, no book on the future of our climate is destined to have a happy ending.

2

Emerging from the Shadows

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Motto: AGRICULTURE AND COMMERCE.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3

The Public Eruption

Many major discoveries were made by forgotten pioneers. So many of the great dinosaurs we know from today’s museums – from Triceratops to Tyrannosaurus – were first unearthed in the U.S., and it is easy to lose sight of what went before. I have explained that dinosaur fossils were known thousands of years before we usually believe they were discovered. Now we can see that there were ideas, images and sculptures of dinosaurs that are far older than the science of palæontology, and it has become clear that curiosity about these massive monsters dates back long before the word ‘dinosaur’ was coined. Indeed, it may have surprised you to see that descriptions and images of fossils were being published in learned books back in the 1600s. Alongside the many men whose names we have encountered stand the women who played a crucial role. Remember that the first person systematically to discover and study prehistoric reptile fossils was a woman, as was the first individual to recognize the significance of a dinosaur tooth, and also the first person to draw perfect studies of fossil dinosaurs for publication. The contributions to mainstream science by women have been widely sidestepped in the past; now would be a good time to reinstate their crucial contributions.

Although the dinosaurs are our theme, palæontologists in England were finding the fossilized remains of other plants and animals and recording them in detail long before dinosaurs were recognized. This research was far more extensive than we usually imagine, and it was captured in a book by John Morris that was published in 1845. Morris was born in 1810 in London and had been privately educated to become a pharmaceutical chemist, yet he became increasingly interested in fossils, and began to publish scientific papers on his discoveries. Morris was a man of prodigious energy and had a remarkable memory, but he disliked speaking in public and was not given easily to writing. His strong point, however, was his fastidious facility for cataloguing. In 1845 he published his greatest work, and one which is a forgotten landmark in palæontology: a comprehensive catalogue of all the British fossils. Morris was subsequently appointed Professor of Geology at University College, London, and was elected president of the Geologists’ Association in London for 1868–1871 and again between 1877 and 1879. His catalogue is rarely mentioned in present-day books, but it is a remarkable document. It extends over 224 pages and lists well over 1,000 different fossil species that had been formally described.1

After the Great Exhibition in London of 1851 Sir Richard Owen was asked by Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins to advise on the first life-size reconstructions of dinosaurs for the Crystal Palace. The workshop was engraved by Philip Henry Delamotte in 1853.

This may well surprise you; it was only three years after Richard Owen published the notion of a dinosaur, yet already there were hundreds of people pursuing palæontology professionally and there were more than 1,000 known species of fossilized life. Already the burgeoning science of palæontology was becoming well established. The public were increasingly interested in the reality of fossils, and the growth of the railway network in Britain meant that visiting the seashore, and collecting specimens as a hobby, was suddenly available to far more people. During the 1830s, steam railways were inaugurated in England, Ireland, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Austria, Australia, Cuba, Canada and the U.S.; and by the end of the 1840s seaside holidays had become popular in England. People combed the beaches for shells and the rocky strata for fossils. Many families acquired their own collections and the lure of fossils steadily increased. There was suddenly the perfect opportunity to publicize the latest research into dinosaurs. The Great Exhibition in London of 1851 had caused an upsurge in popular interest for everything scientific, and Owen was asked by Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins to help design the first life-size models of dinosaurs for public display in the grounds of the Crystal Palace. Hawkins had already mentioned the idea to Mantell, but he had turned it down. With Owen as the chief adviser, teams of artisans set to work, creating the first sculptures of dinosaurs that the world had ever seen. On New Year’s Eve 1853, Owen planned a dinner party for 11 prominent academics inside a hollow concrete Iguanodon, even though the model was misconstrued. Mantell had realized in 1849 that an Iguanodon was not the elephantine monster that Owen was constructing, but was more graceful, with slender forelimbs. However, by now it was too late to change the design. A 30-foot (9-metre) representation of the Iguanodon was one of the first of these concrete dinosaurs to be built. To generate publicity, the dinner party had been arranged in the open cast of the partly completed sculpture, with Owen sitting at the head of the table opposite Francis Fuller, the managing director of the Crystal Palace, and with nine more seats squeezed into the space. Once the party was over, the top section was added to the sculpture and the world’s first life-size dinosaur model was complete. It is one of the original sculptures that can be seen to this day at the Crystal Palace Park, in the London borough of Bromley. These dinosaur models are different to our present-day interpretation, though they are vivid examples of how dinosaurs were first interpreted in Victorian England. Apart from true dinosaurs, the 15 sculptures include plesiosaurs and ichthyosaurs, together with a few prehistoric mammals. They survived in a neglected state until 1973, when they were classified as Grade II listed buildings. In 2002 they were meticulously repaired, and were upgraded to Grade I in 2007. Now that they have been properly restored, they should last forever, or at least as long as London.

A unique dinner party took place at 5:00 pm on December 31, 1853, with 11 luminaries seated inside the partly completed Iguanodon. Waterhouse Hawkins sent out the invitations, and Sir Richard Owen was seated at the head of the table.

The quarries of southern England continued to reveal strange new forms of prehistoric life, and often the excavations began with digging into the base of a cliff comprising the desired minerals. One such quarry had been dug out of the cliffs during the 1850s at Black Ven to the east of Lyme Regis. The owner was James Harrison who lived in Charmouth, and who excavated the area for high-quality Charmouth mudstone that dates from the late Sinemurian stage, about 191 million years ago, and was destined for burning into cement. Once in a while, the workmen would retrieve a bone, and these fossils were kept safely as interesting curiosities. Harrison often took them home and displayed them on the mantelpiece or in the hallway for the interest of guests. A surgeon and amateur geologist, Henry Norris, visited Dorset on vacation and became friendly with Harrison. Norris pointed out that these fossils could be important, and even valuable. So, in 1858 the two men sent a parcel containing some broken bones to Owen at the British Museum (Natural History) in London and asked for his opinion. The most conspicuous was a left femur that Owen realized was different from anything previously recorded. He formally described it in 1859, naming the genus Scelidosaurus. Owen’s intention was to name it from the same Greek word from which the word ‘skeleton’ is derived, σκέλος (skelos, hindlimb), because of the strong femur he had examined, but he confused it instead with σκελίς (skelis, rib of beef). He made a mistake: the new dinosaur should have been named Scelodosaurus.

James Harrison, a Dorset quarry manager, discovered this skull of Scelidosaurus harrisonii after it was excavated in mudstone destined for the cement furnace. It was purchased by Henry Norris and published by the Palæontological Society in 1861.

Harrison later retrieved a portion of the tibia and fibula of this creature, then a claw, and finally a skull, which Owen formally described in 1861, naming this species Scelidosaurus harrisonii in honour of its discoverer. When the rest of the dinosaur had been excavated, it revealed a surprisingly complete skeleton. Although the tip of the animal’s snout was missing, the skull and jaws were intact, and the pelvis, ribs, hindlimbs and most of the vertebræ were retrieved. Of the forelimbs (and the end of the tail) there was no sign, but otherwise it was an incredible find. The body of Scelidosaurus measured about 13 feet (4 metres) long and was covered with a protective shield of bony scales or scutes, hundreds of which had survived, with many still in roughly the original position. This was the most complete dinosaur skeleton ever found, yet Owen carried out hardly any further investigation. This dinosaur was later described by the prominent American palæontologist Othniel Marsh, who erroneously assumed it had long legs, but not until the 1960s was it further investigated. Acid treatment was used to help release the scutes from their stony matrix, but the entire fossil has yet to be completely recovered. After nearly 160 years, this fascinating fossil is still waiting to be fully described.

These are stories with endless fascination, and they have attracted the attention of innumerable authors and even some movie producers. In 2002 the story of the pioneering British work on dinosaurs became the subject of a television movie produced by National Geographic, The Dinosaur Hunters. Henry Ian Cusick played Gideon Mantell and Rachel Shelley played his wife Mary. Alan Cox was Richard Owen, Michelle Bunyan his wife Caroline; Mary Anning was portrayed by Rebecca McClay and William Buckland by Michael Pennington. The movie was well received and remains available online.2

Beachcombers were now so abundant in England that they were sometimes teased for their eagerness. A cartoon for Punch magazine in 1858 showed a beach scene dotted with bizarre objects that look like barnacles; closer inspection shows they were day-trippers in petticoats, all bending over to search for fossils and seashells. That same year, William Dyce, a leading landscape painter, created his detailed picture Pegwell Bay, Kent – a Recollection of October 5th, 1858, which showed an autumnal beach scene with his family gathering specimens from the beach. Dyce was a student of geology and astronomy, and had painted the same bay before. This painting includes finely detailed studies of the chalky cliffs, while, high in the heavens, he captures the faint image of Donati’s comet to commemorate the widespread public interest in such phenomena. By this time, people were buying microscopes and telescopes as never before, and the popular understanding of science was burgeoning.

Searching for wildlife and fossils on the beach became such a popular pastime in Victorian England that cartoonist John Leech published this portrayal of beachcombers in Punch magazine in 1858. Their hooped skirts were reminiscent of giant barnacles.

While this excitement was spreading in Britain, new dinosaurs were being discovered in mainland Europe, and in 1859 a German physician and part-time palæontologist, Joseph Oberndorfer, acquired an exquisite little skeleton to add to his collection. He lived in the Riedenburg-Kelheim region of Bavaria, surrounded by quarries where a remarkably smooth and small-grained limestone was obtained. These layers had been laid down some 151 million years ago in a vast shallow lagoon, forming strata with so fine a grain that in 1798 a method was discovered for using the rock to produce flawless lithographic plates for printers. (To this day, lithographers speak of working ‘on the stone’ even though plastic and metal have long since replaced the German stone slabs.) From time to time, the local quarrymen used to find the remains of creatures trapped in the limestone, and the skeleton of a small dinosaur was perfectly preserved in the thin slab of rock that Oberndorfer obtained. He passed the fossil over to Johann A. Wagner, Professor of Zoology at the University of Munich, who had made extensive studies of mammalian fossils (including mammoths and mastodons) and who was delighted to be able to describe and name a new dinosaur. He decided to call it Compsognathus longipes from the Greek κομψός (kompsos, delicate) and γνάθος (gnathos, jawbone). The specific epithet longipes comes from the Latin longus (long) and pes (foot).3

When W.F.A. Zimmerman published Le monde avant la creation de l’homme (The World Before the Creation of Man) in 1857, this engraving entitled ‘Primitive World’ by Adolphe-François Pannemaker was the frontispiece.

This was a momentous discovery, for it was the first complete skeleton of a carnivorous theropod dinosaur ever to be discovered, and it was also one of the smallest. It measures about 3 feet (90 cm) long and would have been the size of a swan. In 1865 Oberndorfer sold the specimen to the Bavarian State Institute for Paleontology and Historical Geology in Munich, where it is on display to this day. Curiously, we can still see its food: there is the skeleton of a small lizard still visible within the abdomen. When Othniel Marsh examined it in 1881 he concluded that it must have been an embryo within a female Compsognathus, though it was later accepted that it was the remains of a meal – lizards would have been a probable prey for a dinosaur like this. At the time, nobody realized that this was a raptor, in essence one of the tribe to which giants like Poekilopleuron and Megalosaurus belonged. Nothing more was found of this genus until 1971 when a second, somewhat larger, skeleton was retrieved from the lithographic limestone of Canjuers north of Draguignan, in Provence. This one measures 4 feet (125 cm) long and was quickly given a new species name Compsognathus corallestris, though this is almost certainly just a younger example of C. longipes. This second specimen was acquired in 1983 by the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris, where it is on public display. This diminutive dinosaur was interpreted as a fierce little hunter, and in 1997 its digital re-creation was given a prominent role in The Lost World: Jurassic Park.

An exquisitely preseved specimen of Compsognathus longipes, a small theropod the size of a goose, was published by Johann Andreas Wagner in 1861. It had been discovered in limestone deposits from Riedenburg-Kelheim in Bavaria.

In England, Owen was preoccupied with the foundation of a new museum to house all such specimens. He had succeeded in being appointed superintendent of the natural history collections at the British Museum in 1856, whereupon he announced his first mission would be to remove all the biological specimens, not just the dinosaurs, and install them in a new building of their own. One of his strongest supporters was Antonio Panizzi, the museum’s librarian, who had never liked the expansion of the museum into natural history, and was eager to see the specimens depart. Panizzi wanted the space. The campaign eventually succeeded, and in 1873 work began on the new museum in South Kensington that we know today. This was the British Museum (Natural History), and it opened in 1881. Not until 1963 did it become a museum in its own right; only since then has it been known as the Natural History Museum. Owen was appointed the first director of the new establishment, and a magnificent statue of him was erected in the main entrance hall. But it didn’t last; in 2009 it was summarily removed, only to be replaced by a statue of the single individual that Owen disliked most of all: Charles Darwin. It was the ultimate irony.

We celebrate the life of this man who coined the term ‘dinosaur’, Sir Richard Owen, founder of the Natural History Museum. He was a brilliant comparative anatomist but was regarded as arrogant, sadistic and deceitful by his peers.

Owen had always been a scientific anatomist, given to analysis and discipline, who saw no reason to modify his religious beliefs. Charles Darwin, on the other hand, was a collector and an ardent student of natural history. The publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species immediately made sense of dinosaurs. Science could now argue that there was a steady process of evolution, and there were innumerable extinct species that marked the various stages from the distant past. I have explained that, although we imagine that the study of dinosaurs began with Owen, in fact it dates back much further – and curiously, the same is true of evolution. We regard it as Darwin’s great revelation, but in fact the idea goes back to the ancients, and a clear understanding of natural selection was written by others, long before Charles Darwin happened on the scene. We celebrate Darwin as the originator of evolution, indeed ‘his’ theory is celebrated by everyone as a cornerstone of modern science, but he was not the first to come up with the idea. His pre-eminence in evolution is a myth that has fooled us all. The idea of evolution was understood by the Ancient Greeks; Empedocles wrote about it around 450 BC, as did Lucretius some three centuries later. Aristotle envisaged the progress of life as a Great Chain of Being around 350 years BC – so evolutionary ideas had been around for 2,000 years before Darwin’s time. Indeed, he was not even the first in his family to write on the subject. Charles Darwin had a distinguished grandfather named Erasmus who has been lovingly documented by my much-admired friend Desmond King-Hele, himself a distinguished physicist and a specialist on space research. In his spare time, King-Hele has written extensively on Erasmus Darwin, who was a leading physician. He wrote a great work on life entitled Zoonomia in two great volumes that embraced many subjects – including evolution. The book was published in 1794, and included these words:

Since the earth began to exist, perhaps millions of ages before the commencement of the history of mankind, would it be too bold to imagine, that all warm-blooded animals have arisen from one living filament, which the first great cause endued with animality, with the power of acquiring new parts, attended with new propensities, directed by irritations, sensations, volitions, and associations; and thus possessing the faculty of continuing to improve by its own inherent activity, and of delivering down those improvements by generation to its posterity.

There you have it: evolution in a nutshell. Erasmus went further, and even proposed survival of the fittest as the mechanism involved: ‘The strongest and most active animal should propagate the species, which should thence become improved,’ he wrote back in 1794. Here we have the nature of evolution spelled out decades before Charles began his work. The notion of ‘survival of the fittest’ was not even mentioned in the papers on evolution by Wallace and Darwin that were presented to the Linnean Society in 1858, yet here we can see that it had been spelled out by Charles’s grandfather more than 60 years earlier. When challenged, Charles conceded that he had of course read Zoonomia, but insisted that his grandfather’s ideas had ‘no influence’ on his own thoughts, which would be a remarkable example of selective amnesia. In fact, the concept of evolution by natural selection had been current for decades before he wrote his book, and some even predate Erasmus. A French explorer and philosopher named Pierre Louis Maupertuis had written about the idea in his book Vénus Physique (‘the earthly Venus’), published in 1745. Here it is in the original French:

Le hasard, dirait-on, avait produit une multitude innombrable d’individus; un petit nombre se trouvait construit de manière que les parties de l’animal pouvaient satisfaire à ses besoins; dans un autre infiniment plus grand, il n’y avait ni convenance, ni ordre: tous ces derniers ont péri.

In English, it reads:

Chance, you might say, produced an innumerable multitude of individuals; a small number found themselves constructed in such a manner that the parts of the animal were able to satisfy its needs; in another infinitely greater number, there was neither fitness nor order: all of these latter have perished.4

There we see ‘survival of the fittest’ spelled out unambiguously a century before Charles Darwin was active. It is clear from the words of Maupertuis that the idea of natural selection was known far earlier than it is popular to imagine, yet his work too has been largely forgotten. Desmond King-Hele has suggested to me that the disappearance of his work could be due to suppression by Voltaire, to whose lover Maupertuis taught mathematics. She was Gabrielle Émilie Le Tonnelier de Breteuil, the Marquise du Châtelet, and a brilliant mathematician who translated Isaac Newton’s Principia into French. Little wonder Voltaire regarded Maupertuis with envy.

Four years later the notion of evolution was spelled out by Georges Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, who was the greatest naturalist in France of his generation. He understood what fossils were, and he also recognized that living organisms changed over time, and that they came from simpler, common ancestors. Buffon’s books extended to numerous volumes and were highly detailed, while his grounding in practical science was exemplified by the engraving that acted as the opening illustration to the History of Animals – it shows him peering intently at a specimen down a microscope.5

As we have discovered, James Hutton was a brilliant geologist, and in 1794 he also came up with the essential idea of evolution by natural selection. In a far-reaching book on knowledge and reason, he wrote:

If an organized body is not in the situation and circumstances best adapted to its sustenance and propagation, then, in conceiving an indefinite variety among the individuals of that species, we must be assured, that, on the one hand, those which depart most from the best adapted constitution, will be the most liable to perish, while, on the other hand, those organized bodies, which most approach to the best constitution for the present circumstances, will be best adapted to continue, in preserving themselves and multiplying the individuals of their race.6

In the words ‘best adapted’ we have ‘survival of the fittest’ spelled out once more, long before Charles Darwin. Hutton’s thoughts might have gained even greater currency, but he had appalling handwriting and many correspondents had difficulty making out what he meant, so his followers relied only on his published works. Here is yet another quotation – still dating from the eighteenth century:

At length, a discovery was supposed to be made of primitive animalcula, or organic molecula, from which every kind of animal was formed; a shapeless, clumsy, microscopical object. This, by the natural tendency of original propagation to vary to protect the species, produced other better organized. These again produced other more perfect than themselves, till at last appeared the most complete of species, mankind, beyond whose perfection it is impossible for the work of generation to proceed.7

These words reiterate the concept of ‘survival of the fittest’ and were published in a book by Richard Joseph Sullivan in 1794.

This was the same year in which the farmer-cum-physician James Hutton published the idea of natural selection and Erasmus Darwin published Zoonomia, embracing similar thoughts. If there was truly a year when ‘survival of the fittest’ emerged in the literature of science as the principle driving evolution, then in my view it was 1794 – 65 years before Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species. His grandfather Erasmus revisited the topic of evolution in his poem entitled The Temple of Nature, published in 1802:

First forms minute, unseen by spheric glass,

Move on the mud, or pierce the watery mass;

These, as successive generations bloom,

New powers acquire, and larger limbs assume;

Whence countless groups of vegetation spring,

And breathing realms of fin and feet and wing.

Here are the notions that great eras had passed; ages of creatures living in water and aspiring to evolve on land had existed long before our present-day world emerged. By 1810 Jean-Baptiste Lamarck was publishing his views on evolution in France, and came up with a theory that was quickly rejected. Lamarck claimed that organisms evolved because of adaptations made in response to the experiences of successive generations – the reason a giraffe has a long neck, his theory argued, is because successive generations had stretched to reach up for leaves. Survival of the fittest, by contrast, holds that natural selection of longer-necked animals takes place as those with shorter necks were eliminated by an inability to reach up for leaves, and so they would die of starvation. We all know the two versions, and we have been taught to dismiss Lamarck and his views as misguided. Yet Charles Darwin did not do so – for him, the inheritance of acquired characteristics was entirely possible. This surprising view was called Pangenesis by Darwin, and he included many examples of the phenomenon in the last chapter of a book published in 1875 entitled Variation in Plants and Animals under Domestication. The argument was that cells within an organism would produce ‘gemmules’, microscopic particles containing inheritable information that accumulated in the germinal cells, which runs contrary to what is conventionally called Darwinian evolution. This is a remarkable revelation: in some ways, Darwin supported Lamarckism. More recent findings by biologists including Denis Noble at Oxford University have revealed the extent to which genetic change can be passed on through epigenetics – the way gene expression is regulated – so we now know that the extent to which genes are expressed can impose profound controls on evolution. Lamarck was partly right.

Although the theories expounded by Wallace and Darwin were to propose natural selection as an evolutionary principle, that essential idea had recently been published by an experimenter whose name has largely been forgotten. He was an arboriculturist named Patrick Matthew. Like Darwin, he went to Edinburgh University, and like Darwin, he left without a degree. Matthew returned to his family home in Errol, a small Scottish town, where he showed proficiency as a grower of fruit trees. He experimented with cross-breeding, and, notably, with grafting. These activities gave him insights into heredity, and in 1831 he published an important book entitled On Naval Timber and Arboriculture. It is in the Appendix that he introduced the crucial concept of natural selection. Wrote Matthew: ‘There is a law universal in nature, tending to render every reproductive being the best possibly suited to its condition,’ and he continued:

Nature, in all her modifications of life, has a power of increase far beyond what is needed to supply the place of what falls. Those individuals who possess not the requisite strength, swiftness, hardihood, or cunning, fall prematurely without reproducing … their place being occupied by the more perfect of their own kind.8

This was in print, and widely available, 27 years before Charles Darwin’s ideas were first presented. When the matter was raised with Darwin, he wrote: ‘I freely acknowledge that Mr. Matthew has anticipated by many years the explanation which I have offered on the origin of species under the name of natural selection,’ and he promised: ‘If another edition of my book is called for, I will insert a notice to the foregoing effect.’ He did not keep his word but wrote instead: ‘An obscure writer on forest trees clearly anticipated my views … though not a single person ever noticed the scattered passages in his book.’ In the fourth edition of the Origin of Species, Darwin eventually admitted:

In 1831, Mr. Patrick Matthew, published his work on Naval Timber and Arboriculture, in which he gives PRECISELY the same view of the origin of species as that … propounded by Mr. Wallace and myself in the Linnean Journal, and as that enlarged in the present volume.

He then added:

Unfortunately, the view was given by Mr. Matthew very briefly in scattered passages in an Appendix to a work on a different subject, so that it remained unnoticed until Mr. Matthew himself drew attention to it in the Gardeners’ Chronicle, on April 7th, 1860.9

This claim was disingenuous. Matthew’s views were well known and widely discussed when first they appeared – indeed, many libraries banned his book because of its scandalous allegations that evolution had occurred.

Since I have shown clearly that Charles Darwin was not the first to write a book on evolution, then who was? The first great book on the subject was Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, published in 1844 and written in great secrecy by an anonymous naturalist, who remained unrecognized as the author for many years.10

The unnamed author stated that all forms of life had evolved over time, and they had done so according to natural laws and not because of divine intervention. He included in his text a diagram of an evolutionary tree, which was the first ever to appear in print. Although Vestiges contained descriptions of the ‘progress of organic life upon the globe’, the text did not contain the word ‘evolution’. The book was enormously successful for its time, selling over 20,000 copies to readers including world leaders such as Queen Victoria and Abraham Lincoln, politicians from William Gladstone to Benjamin Disraeli, scientists like Adam Sedgwick and Thomas Henry Huxley. The book was devoured with enthusiasm by Alfred Russel Wallace. Many years later it was revealed that the author was Robert Chambers, a naturalist who espoused evolutionary theory. His belief in an explanation founded on scientific rationalism went too far when he believed in the claims of W.H. Weekes, who insisted that he had created living mites by passing electricity through a solution of potassium ferrocyanate (K4[Fe(CN)6] · 3H2O). Chambers clearly saw biological evolution as steady upward progress, though he felt it was governed by divine laws. Another prior advocate of evolution was the Reverend Baden Powell, Professor of Geometry at the University of Oxford and father of the founder of the Boy Scout movement, Robert Baden Powell. In his Essays on the Unity of Worlds, published in 1855, he wrote that all plants and animals had evolved from earlier, simpler forms, through principles that were essentially scientific. Powell also wrote to Darwin, complaining that his own views on evolution should have been cited in his book.

Charles Darwin did admit the influence of Thomas Malthus, who published several editions of An Essay on the Principle of Population between 1798 and 1826. In the opinion of Malthus, a leading British scholar, competition was an important factor regulating the growth of societies. Darwin conceded to his readers that his ideas were not original: in the introduction to The Descent of Man he emphasized: ‘The conclusion that man is the co-descendant with other species of ancient, lower, and extinct forms is not in any degree new.’ Darwin knew that; modern scholars, intent on mindless magnification of the man, have forgotten the fact. This is how science is taught to us all. Reality is somewhat different.

Just as we imagine that Richard Owen gave us dinosaurs, we have been taught to hero-worship Charles Darwin as the originator of evolutionary theory. Yet we can now see that evolution was far from being Charles’ original idea. Not only had it been summarized by his own grandfather in a previous century, but the essential notion of natural selection was omitted from his early accounts of evolutionary mechanisms, even though it had been published decades earlier by an experimenter whose work Darwin knew. Today, we know Charles Darwin for the crucial concept ‘survival of the fittest’, and most authorities say that the theory is Darwin’s own – yet ‘survival of the fittest’ was not even his phrase. It was coined by Herbert Spencer in his own book on biology. Wrote Spencer: ‘Survival of the fittest, which I have here sought to express in mechanical terms, is that which Mr. Darwin has called ‘natural selection’, or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life.’11

So you can see that evolution by natural selection was thought up long before Darwin began to write about it, and his most famous phrase – survival of the fittest – was coined by somebody else. Indeed the phrase did not enter Darwin’s own writings until the Origin of Species appeared in its fifth edition. Even by this time, he had not mentioned the word ‘evolution’ to describe his views, for that term did not appear until the Origin of Species was in its sixth edition.

Belief in Darwinian evolution has since become an academic requirement. The question: ‘Are you, or are you not, a Darwinist?’ is used to mark out real biologists from those beyond the pale. It is rich in resonances of Senator Joseph McCarthy and the famous question: ‘Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist Party?’ If you don’t espouse Darwinism, then the biological establishment won’t want you. Yet we have now seen that Charles Darwin didn’t discover evolution. He was not the first to introduce the idea of ‘natural selection’, and he wasn’t even the HMS Beagle’s naturalist. When it came to evolution, Charles Darwin was a latecomer on the scientific scene – during his lifetime his book on earthworms outsold the volume on evolution. Modern-day science likes to worship remote figureheads; but much of this tendency is simply science’s cult of celebrity. Don’t be taken in.

It is clear that the person who triggered Darwin’s interests in evolution was a brilliant young explorer named Alfred Russel Wallace. Wallace worked as a watchmaker, a surveyor and then a school teacher before setting out to explore the Amazon in 1848. His intention was to collect specimens for commercial sale to collectors back in Britain, but his ship was destroyed by fire on the way home to England and all the collections went up in flames. You might think that this costly disaster would have ended his career, but Wallace had been fully insured. He claimed for the value of the lost specimens and suddenly was wealthy, without the need to sell everything that he had discovered. With the proceeds safely in his bank, he wrote up his findings on palm trees and on monkeys, and set off again, exploring and collecting in Southeast Asia.

While staying on Borneo, Wallace wrote a paper ‘On the Law which has Regulated the Introduction of Species’ that was published in the Annals and Magazine of Natural History in September 1855. He asserted that ‘Every species has come into existence coincident both in space and time with a closely allied species’ and noted (as he had done in a book he had written on the Amazon monkeys) that geographical separation seemed to lead to species becoming distinct, a finding that Darwin confirmed with his observations of the Galápagos finches. Wallace then wrote another great paper entitled ‘On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type’. Before seeking a publisher, he mailed it to Darwin to ask for his scholarly opinion. Darwin received it on June 18, 1858 and realized that here, set down in writing in detail, was a theory of evolution by natural selection. There was nothing new in the idea. Remember, it had been casually circulating for centuries and the concept had been part of the vernacular currency of biological science since Erasmus Darwin’s publications of 1784. For decades, Charles Darwin (along with so many others) had assumed that evolution proceeded through natural selection, and now Wallace had set it out formally in a scientific paper. Evolution had been studied by Wallace as a mechanism operating among wild organisms in nature, whereas Darwin had mostly studied artificial breeding by farmers and horticulturists. This was a suitable time for the theory to be discussed, and Alfred Russel Wallace was the man who triggered the debate. Darwin decided to discuss the paper with his friends. Some of his circle were professional men of science, like Joseph Dalton Hooker; others were struggling to find a position, including Thomas Henry Huxley who had won the gold medal of the Royal Society but still could not find employment. Huxley wrote at the time: ‘Science in England does everything but pay. You may earn praise, but not pudding.’12

Darwin was also acquainted with a range of independent-minded investigators, including John Tyndall, who was a self-taught physicist; Thomas Hirst, an amateur mathematician; Edwin Lankester, a builder’s son who taught himself medical biology; and Arthur Henfrey, who had qualified in medicine but became prominent as a self-taught botanist. Darwin gathered some of these friends together to discuss how he should react to Wallace’s detailed article, and it was eventually agreed that a summary of Darwin’s ideas could be appended to a formal reading of Wallace’s paper. Darwin had set down a few thoughts in a letter to Hooker written in 1847, and there were more in a letter he had written to Asa Gray in 1857. These would make the basis of a submission. A suitable opportunity arose when the Linnean Society suddenly announced the date of a special meeting; there would be time for the reading of new research papers. The Society’s president, Robert Brown (the person who named the cell nucleus, and after whom Brownian Motion is named), had suddenly died, and July 1, 1858 was chosen as the date to elect a successor. Since there was time available for additional scientific presentations, it was agreed that the Honorary Secretary would read Wallace’s paper on evolution, followed by the extracts from Darwin’s letters on the subject. Neither Wallace nor Darwin was present. This launched the theory of evolution for discussion in the world of science, yet it did not catch anyone’s attention at the time. The new president of the Society thought it unimportant. In his annual report for 1858, he said that the year ‘had not been marked by any of those striking discoveries which at once revolutionize, so to speak, our department of science.’ That puts him in the same category as the A & R man at Decca who turned down The Beatles.

Today you can visit Charles Darwin’s house as a museum, just 9 miles (15 km) southeast of the Crystal Palace dinosaurs. The building is Down House, and it lies in the village of Downe. Today it looks just the same as it did when Charles Darwin lived there, with the rooms rich in original décor and authentic furnishings – but the back-story is very different. In 1907, the premises were sold and re-fitted to become Downe School for Girls. It remained so until 1922, when another girls’ school took over and ran until 1927. By this time, the rooms that Darwin used had all been stripped out, repainted in grey and converted into classrooms. The school building was then purchased in 1929 by a surgeon, Sir George Buckston Browne, with the idea of turning it into a museum. Down House was eventually acquired by English Heritage in 1996 and it reopened to the public after extensive refurbishment in April 1998. I have visited it many times and chaired meetings there. My friend Stephen Jay Gould flew over to speak at a conference I was organizing at the house. Original items from Darwin’s time have been returned over the years, and other items that are similar to the original furnishings have been purchased. Walking through the house today, it is hard to imagine it stripped bare and repainted as hordes of pubescent women tramped through its hallowed corridors for so many years – at that time, the interior was unrecognizable. The home now is a latter-day reconstruction, though the visitor may not easily discover the fact.13

Another frequent misconception is that Darwin was the official naturalist when he made his famous voyage in the Beagle. In a statement in the Origin of Species of 1859, Darwin claims to have ‘been on board HMS Beagle, as naturalist’. The implication is not correct. The ship already had an officially appointed naturalist, Robert McKormick, who also served as the ship’s doctor. Darwin was on board as the travelling companion of the ship’s master, Admiral Robert FitzRoy, the person who invented weather forecasts. He had invited Darwin because of his reading theology at Cambridge. FitzRoy was a fervent Christian, and hoped that Charles Darwin could utilize his knowledge to reconcile geology and biology to the teaching of the Bible. Darwin may have claimed to have been the ship’s naturalist in his later writings, but at the time he wrote that his appointment was ‘not a very regular affair’. We like to imagine that the Beagle was an explorers’ vessel on a civil voyage of discovery, but she was actually a Royal Navy warship: a Cherokee-class brig. This was a naval expedition, not a journey of discovery. And the captain had an ulterior motive; three captives had been brought to England from Tierra del Fuego; they had been taught English and trained as Christian missionaries. FitzRoy had taken on the major share of financing the voyage, because he wanted to return these men to the country of their birth where they could spread the word of God to this newly discovered land. The Navy organized the voyage on condition that FitzRoy meticulously surveyed the coast and the oceans around South America, so that precise navigational charts could be drawn up. Looking for new forms of life was nowhere in the plans.

The ship set sail on December 27, 1831. Darwin soon became absorbed by the many exotic life forms he encountered on that famous holiday. He was able to go ashore at will to collect and explore to his heart’s content. His adventures were comprehensively detailed in a book he wrote describing the voyage of the Beagle.14

He came to realize how coral atolls were formed, and he published a monograph entitled The Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs. His adventures were many: in Chile he witnessed an earthquake. On the Galápagos Islands he dined on the flesh of the giant tortoises and later described how the different shapes of their shells seemed to match the lifestyle imposed by the environmental situation of the different islands. The Galápagos finches, he concluded, were similar to those on the mainland but had clearly changed over time. He noted: ‘Such facts undermine the stability of species.’ He then changed it by adding one cautionary word: ‘Such facts would undermine the stability of species.’ There was no implication here that the presumed changeability of species was a novel concept, just that his observations substantiated the accepted view.15

The accessible style and exotic nature of the subject brought a wide readership, and suddenly Darwin had a new career – as an author of popular science. To me, his most visible legacy is his list of published books, which represent a remarkable devotion to making science accessible. They are all vividly written. Apart from the Origin of Species, he wrote on the geology of South America and on volcanic islands (1844), on the fertilization of orchids (1862), the movements of climbing plants (1865), the effects of cultivation on variation in plants and animals (1868), the Descent of Man (1871), insectivorous plants (1875), the effects of cross-fertilization in plants (1876), The Different Forms of Flowers on Plants of the Same Species (1877), and finally The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms, with Observations on their Habits (1881). This last title was a best-seller. Remember, Darwin’s book on worms sold far more copies during his lifetime than the Origin of Species.

Curiously, Charles Darwin showed no interest in dinosaurs. He is the person who popularized the theory of evolution, in which dinosaurs would play such an important part, but he did not include them in any of his books. How curious that Robert Darwin, who had presented the first scientific account of a fossil reptile in 1719, had been Charles’ great-grandfather. Since Charles’ grandfather Erasmus had also written about evolution, it is surprising that although Charles Darwin himself was fascinated by fossils, he had nothing to say about dinosaurs. Although the fact is little discussed these days, Charles Darwin was an expert with the microscope and he became interested in the microscopical structure of fossilized plants. He knew that they had been faithfully preserved in rock, but how much could you discern with the microscope? Was the cellular structure preserved?16

Darwin was not the first to speculate thus. As long ago as May 27, 1663, Robert Hooke at the Royal Society of London had looked at fossilized wood under his microscope. As we have seen (here), Hooke had carefully scrutinized his specimen of fossilized wood, and had worked out how it was formed, and he ascertained that the fossil sample showed the same structure as a specimen of fresh wood:

I found, that the grain, colour, and shape of the Wood, was exactly like this petrify’d substance; and with a Microscope, I found, that all those Microscopical pores, which in sappy or firm and sound Wood are fill’d with the natural or innate juices of those Vegetables, in that they were all empty, like those of Vegetables charr’d …17

By 1665 Hooke had recognized that fossil wood was similar to the structure of present-day plants. Darwin made the same observation, but he took it a stage further. Rather than simply inspecting the surface, he resolved to have the rocky fossils ground down with an abrasive paste to produce the thinnest of sections – so fine that light could shine through to reveal the inner structure. He had collected fossilized wood during his sojourn on HMS Beagle in 1834 when they called at the Isla Grande de Chiloé, midway along the coast of Chile. He noted at the time that he had found numerous specimens of ‘black lignite and silicified and pyritous wood, often embedded close together.’ Joseph Dalton Hooker, the founder of geographical botany and the director of Kew Gardens for 20 years, was a close friend of Darwin’s and he catalogued the specimens for the British Geological Survey in 1846. The collections were then lost for 165 years, until Howard Falcon-Lang, of the Department of Earth Sciences at Royal Holloway College of the University of London, investigated some drawers in a cabinet labelled ‘unregistered fossil plants’ in the vaults of the British Geological Survey near Nottingham. Falcon-Lang reported: ‘Inside the drawers were hundreds of beautiful glass slides made by polishing fossil plants into thin translucent sheets, a process [that] allows them to be studied under the microscope. Almost the first slide I picked up was labelled C. Darwin Esq.’ This remarkable discovery was a treasure trove, and all the slides have now been digitized and put online for public scrutiny.

Stylised portrayals of an ichthyosaur and plesiosaur were published by Louis Figuier in La Terre avant le Déluge (the World before the Flood) in 1863. The drawing, by Édouard Riou, was engraved by Laurent Hotelin and Alexandre Hurel.

Given that the idea of evolution was fundamental to the understanding of dinosaurs in their temporal context, and that Darwin himself was an enthusiastic investigator of fossilized plants, it is surprising to me that he showed little interest in dinosaurs. Yet within two years of his book appearing, a discovery was made that seemed to provide the perfect example of evolutionary theory. This was the discovery in Germany of what seemed to be a creature halfway between reptile and bird – Archæopteryx. The skeletons and feathers have been excavated from the limestone quarries that surround Solnhofen, Germany. First to appear was a lone feather, found in 1860 by Christian Hermann von Meyer and now on display at the Humboldt Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin (see footnote here). Nobody can be certain it came from Archæopteryx, and it may belong to a similar (but different) genus, but the following year a skeleton was found in the same limestone at a quarry in Langenaltheim, 5 miles (8 km) west of Solnhofen. It was donated to a local physician, Karl Häberlein, in lieu of his professional fees. Knowing of the interest in palæontology then spreading across England, Häberlein sold it to the British Museum (Natural History) for the princely sum of £700 (today worth about £45,000 or $52,000). This has long been known as the London Specimen, and it is on display at the Natural History Museum to this day. The skeleton is mostly complete, though it lacks much of the skull and cervical vertebræ. In 1863 Richard Owen formally named it Archæopteryx macrura, admitting that it might not be the same species as the one from which the feather found by von Meyer had originated. Darwin was pleased by the find, for it fitted so well with the theories in his book. In the fourth edition, he added a note:

Now we know, on the authority of professor Owen, that a bird certainly lived during the deposition of the upper greensand; and still more recently, that strange bird, the Archæopteryx, with a long lizard-like tail, bearing a pair of feathers on each joint, and with its wings furnished with two free claws, has been discovered in the oolitic slates of Solnhofen. Hardly any recent discovery shows more forcibly than this how little we as yet know of the former inhabitants of the world.

It was many decades before further specimens of Archæopteryx were unearthed. The Eichstätt specimen was discovered in 1951 near Workerszell, Germany, and was not formally described until 1974, when details were published by Peter Wellnhofer. The fossil is on display at the Jura Museum in Eichstätt, Germany, and is of a curiously diminutive form. It has been suggested that it may be a different genus, and has been given the alternative name of Jurapteryx. The jury is still out on that. More typical of the type is the Maxberg specimen, which was discovered in Germany in 1956 and described in 1959. It was owned by a collector, Eduard Opitsch, who loaned it for exhibition in the Maxberg Museum in Solnhofen. When Opitsch died in 1991 and his estate was catalogued, that fine fossil had vanished. To this day, nobody knows what happened to it. Another fossil from Solnhofen, which had been discovered in 1972, was identified after being classified as an example of Compsognathus. This one too is the subject of debate, and some authorities want to classify it as Wellnhoferia, a cousin to Archæopteryx. A further example known as the Munich Specimen was unearthed in August 1992 by quarryman Jürgen Hüttinger who was working for the Solenhofer Aktien-Verein in the limestone quarries of Langenaltheim. Hüttinger duly reported his find to the quarry manager, who again called in Wellnhofer, the specialist palæontologist. The fossil was in fragments, and it was painstakingly reassembled in the State Paläontology Collection workshops. Only then was it realized that the skeleton was almost complete, apart from a single wing-tip. A methodical search through a ton of the nearby strata eventually brought it to light, and a near-perfect skeleton was the result. In April 1993, the finished specimen was formally presented to the press in Solnhofen, and it was put on public exhibition during the 150th anniversary of the Bavarian State Collection in Munich. It then went to the U.S. in 1997, where the Chicago Field Museum in Chicago displayed it as ‘Archæopteryx – the bird that rocked the world’, as part of the annual meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology. Eventually, it ended up in Munich’s Paläontologisches Museum, who paid 2 million Deutschmark for the fossil (now almost £1 million or $1.3 million).

Of all the specimens of Archæopteryx, this is the only one with a skull. It was found in 1874 by a farmer named Jakob Niemeyer, who sold it to an innkeeper, Johann Dörr, to decorate his bar. It is now in the Museum für Naturkunde, Berlin.

The best specimen of them all has a mysterious beginning. It was the property of a collector in Switzerland, whose wife – after his death in 2001 – offered it for sale to the Senckenberg Museum in Frankfurt, Germany. They lacked the funds to purchase it until Burkhard Pohl, who founded the Wyoming Dinosaur Center (WDC) in Thermopolis, put them in contact with an anonymous benefactor who came up with the funds. It was put on public display in Frankfurt, and then in 2007 was transferred to Wyoming. German palæontologists were horrified, and began a protest petition. Although no law had been broken by the export of the fossil, it would be unavailable for easy access by German investigators, and would also be passing from a state museum in Frankfurt to a privately owned collection in Wyoming. The directors of the WDC formally issued a statement, saying that the specimen would at all times be freely available for scholarship and study, which mollified the protestors and peace was resumed. This, now known as the Thermopolis Specimen, shows a perfectly preserved skeleton and has been expertly curated. It also retains voluminous sprays of feathers on the body and the wings, and is believed to be the most vivid and perfectly preserved of them all. It has become a key item of evidence in the continuing debate about whether Archæopteryx was truly the first bird or was closer to the dinosaur end of the evolutionary spectrum. It was described in 2005 as having ‘theropod features’ because of the angle of one of its toes; mentioning a connection with meat-eating dinosaurs is a great way to attract maximum attention. Yet nobody knows where it was originally found.18

This specimen was subsequently named Archæopteryx siemensii, and it is not only the best of them all, but is the only one on display outside Europe. It resides in America, and in that sense it is unique.

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