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