wished to distract or alarm Moses with news of earlier, irrelevant extinctions.
So by the early years of the nineteenth century, fossils had taken on a certain inescapable importance, which makes Wistar’s failure to see the significance of his dinosaur bone all the more unfortunate. Suddenly, in any case, bones were turning up all over. Several other opportunities arose for Americans to claim the discovery of dinosaurs but all were wasted. In 1806 the Lewis and Clark expedition passed through the Hell Creek formation in Montana, an area where fossil hunters would later literally trip over dinosaur bones, and even examined what was clearly a dinosaur bone embedded in rock, but failed to make anything of it. Other bones and fossilized footprints were found in the Connecticut River Valley of New England after a farm boy named Plinus Moody spied ancient tracks on a rock ledge at South Hadley, Massachusetts. Some of these at least survive-notably the bones of an Anchisaurus, which are in the collection of the Peabody Museum at Yale. Found in 1818, they were the first dinosaur bones to be examined and saved, but unfortunately weren’t recognized for what they were until 1855. In that same year, 1818, Caspar Wistar died, but he did gain a certain unexpected immortality when a botanist named Thomas Nuttall named a delightful climbing shrub after him. Some botanical purists still insist on spelling it
By this time, however, paleontological momentum had moved to England. In 1812, at Lyme Regis on the Dorset coast, an extraordinary child named Mary Anning-aged eleven, twelve, or thirteen, depending on whose account you read-found a strange fossilized sea monster, seventeen feet long and now known as the ichthyosaurus, embedded in the steep and dangerous cliffs along the English Channel.
It was the start of a remarkable career. Anning would spend the next thirty-five years gathering fossils, which she sold to visitors. (She is commonly held to be the source for the famous tongue twister “She sells seashells on the seashore.”) She would also find the first plesiosaurus, another marine monster, and one of the first and best pterodactyls. Though none of these was technically a dinosaur, that wasn’t terribly relevant at the time since nobody then knew what a dinosaur was. It was enough to realize that the world had once held creatures strikingly unlike anything we might now find.
It wasn’t simply that Anning was good at spotting fossils-though she was unrivalled at that-but that she could extract them with the greatest delicacy and without damage. If you ever have the chance to visit the hall of ancient marine reptiles at the Natural History Museum in London, I urge you to take it for there is no other way to appreciate the scale and beauty of what this young woman achieved working virtually unaided with the most basic tools in nearly impossible conditions. The plesiosaur alone took her ten years of patient excavation. Although untrained, Anning was also able to provide competent drawings and descriptions for scholars. But even with the advantage of her skills, significant finds were rare and she passed most of her life in poverty.
It would be hard to think of a more overlooked person in the history of paleontology than Mary Anning, but in fact there was one who came painfully close. His name was Gideon Algernon Mantell and he was a country doctor in Sussex.
Mantell was a lanky assemblage of shortcomings-he was vain, self-absorbed, priggish, neglectful of his family-but never was there a more devoted amateur paleontologist. He was also lucky to have a devoted and observant wife. In 1822, while he was making a house call on a patient in rural Sussex, Mrs. Mantell went for a stroll down a nearby lane and in a pile of rubble that had been left to fill potholes she found a curious object-a curved brown stone, about the size of a small walnut. Knowing her husband’s interest in fossils, and thinking it might be one, she took it to him. Mantell could see at once it was a fossilized tooth, and after a little study became certain that it was from an animal that was herbivorous, reptilian, extremely large-tens of feet long-and from the Cretaceous period. He was right on all counts, but these were bold conclusions since nothing like it had been seen before or even imagined.
Aware that his finding would entirely upend what was understood about the past, and urged by his friend the Reverend William Buckland-he of the gowns and experimental appetite-to proceed with caution, Mantell devoted three painstaking years to seeking evidence to support his conclusions. He sent the tooth to Cuvier in Paris for an opinion, but the great Frenchman dismissed it as being from a hippopotamus. (Cuvier later apologized handsomely for this uncharacteristic error.) One day while doing research at the Hunterian Museum in London, Mantell fell into conversation with a fellow researcher who told him the tooth looked very like those of animals he had been studying, South American iguanas. A hasty comparison confirmed the resemblance. And so Mantell’s creature became
Mantell prepared a paper for delivery to the Royal Society. Unfortunately it emerged that another dinosaur had been found at a quarry in Oxfordshire and had just been formally described-by the Reverend Buckland, the very man who had urged him not to work in haste. It was the Megalosaurus, and the name was actually suggested to Buckland by his friend Dr. James Parkinson, the would-be radical and eponym for Parkinson’s disease. Buckland, it may be recalled, was foremost a geologist, and he showed it with his work on Megalosaurus. In his report, for the
Unaware that disappointment was going to be a continuing feature of his life, Mantell continued hunting for fossils-he found another giant, the Hylaeosaurus, in 1833-and purchasing others from quarrymen and farmers until he had probably the largest fossil collection in Britain. Mantell was an excellent doctor and equally gifted bone hunter, but he was unable to support both his talents. As his collecting mania grew, he neglected his medical practice. Soon fossils filled nearly the whole of his house in Brighton and consumed much of his income. Much of the rest went to underwriting the publication of books that few cared to own.
In some desperation Mantell hit on the idea of turning his house into a museum and charging admission, then belatedly realized that such a mercenary act would ruin his standing as a gentleman, not to mention as a scientist, and so he allowed people to visit the house for free. They came in their hundreds, week after week, disrupting both his practice and his home life. Eventually he was forced to sell most of his collection to pay off his debts. Soon after, his wife left him, taking their four children with her.
Remarkably, his troubles were only just beginning.
In the district of Sydenham in south London, at a place called Crystal Palace Park, there stands a strange and forgotten sight: the world’s first life-sized models of dinosaurs. Not many people travel there these days, but once this was one of the most popular attractions in London-in effect, as Richard Fortey has noted, the world’s first theme park. Quite a lot about the models is not strictly correct. The iguanodon’s thumb has been placed on its nose, as a kind of spike, and it stands on four sturdy legs, making it look like a rather stout and awkwardly overgrown dog. (In life, the iguanodon did not crouch on all fours, but was bipedal.) Looking at them now you would scarcely guess that these odd and lumbering beasts could cause great rancor and bitterness, but they did. Perhaps nothing in natural history has been at the center of fiercer and more enduring hatreds than the line of ancient beasts known as dinosaurs.
At the time of the dinosaurs’ construction, Sydenham was on the edge of London and its spacious park was considered an ideal place to re-erect the famous Crystal Palace, the glass and cast-iron structure that had been the centerpiece of the Great Exhibition of 1851, and from which the new park naturally took its name. The dinosaurs, built of concrete, were a kind of bonus attraction. On New Year’s Eve 1853 a famous dinner for twenty- one prominent scientists was held inside the unfinished iguanodon. Gideon Mantell, the man who had found and identified the iguanodon, was not among them. The person at the head of the table was the greatest star of the young science of paleontology. His name was Richard Owen and by this time he had already devoted several productive years to making Gideon Mantell’s life hell.
Owen had grown up in Lancaster, in the north of England, where he had trained as a doctor. He was a born anatomist and so devoted to his studies that he sometimes illicitly borrowed limbs, organs, and other parts from cadavers and took them home for leisurely dissection. Once while carrying a sack containing the head of a
