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’.
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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.
