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
