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
