Theirs proved to be a small dinosaur, measuring some 6 feet 6 inches (2 metres) in length and weighing no more than 55 pounds (25 kg). The men were a diligent pair of investigators and they made a significant observation: in lizards, the roots of the teeth merge with the jawbone, but they noted that their dinosaur was different. It possessed tooth sockets, much like those of mammals. In their formal paper the following year they gave their discovery its name: Thecodontosaurus, derived from the Greek θήκή (thēkē, socket) and οδους (odous, tooth) – so here was yet another new dinosaur for scientists to study.46
Their searches also turned up teeth of phytosaurian dinosaurs that they named Paleosaurus cylindrodon and P. platyodon. Although they didn’t know it, that generic name had already been thought up by Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, so the proposed name was soon abandoned. As Thecodontosaurus this became the fifth dinosaur to be academically named, following Megalosaurus, Iguanodon, Streptospondylus and Hylæosaurus. The fossil was later provided with an appropriate species name, T. antiquus.
Palæontology has long attracted peculiar people, and few were more eccentric than a collector named Thomas Hawkins. Although we imagine the early palæontologists trudging across barren rocks and scrambling into quarries, many of them, as we have seen, adopted a more leisurely approach – they simply purchased specimens dug up by quarrymen, or bought them from specialist dealers like Mary Anning. The young Hawkins was loquacious, brash and bullying, difficult to get on with and given to outbursts of pugnacious prose. He was the son of a wealthy farmer who, rather than encouraging his wayward son to work with him on the family farm in Somerset, gave him a generous allowance to stay away. As a result, the young Hawkins was able to indulge his new passion for fossil collecting and proudly boasted that, by the age of 20 (in 1830), he already had a large and varied collection. He used to wander round the quarries near Walton and Street in Somerset, watching out for discoveries the quarrymen were making. On several occasions, he saw a priceless fossil in a slab of rock that a worker was about to break up and he promptly stepped in with an offer of largesse that could not be refused. He soon gained a reputation for being someone who would pay good money for these fossils whenever they came to light, and so his collection grew, while he had no need to soil his hands by digging. Yet he soon encountered a problem faced by every collector: fossil remains were hardly ever complete. Quite often, valuable fragments were lost as stone was chipped away from the specimen. Dinosaur skeletons usually had limbs missing and often there was no skull (as in the case of Anning’s first ichthyosaur, and the Brontosaurus later described by Marsh). Early in his career, Hawkins became adept at cleaning up fossils and replaced any parts that were missing with dyed plaster. Today, it is acceptable to create an entire dinosaur skeleton from just a few fossil fragments, but at that time any restoration was frowned upon. Mantell summed up Hawkins perfectly as ‘a very young man who has more money than wit’.
Hawkins was a proselytizing Christian and firmly believed in Adam and Eve. Yet he also followed the latest trends in scientific discovery, and formed the view that fossils could reveal what the world was like before humans had been created. The early Earth, he thought, was an alien and hostile place, bathed in murky darkness that sunlight could not penetrate, and peopled by strange monstrous beings that were intent on destruction. On one of his casual visits to a quarry, he found that the tail of a huge ichthyosaur had been laid bare by a workman. The men had agreed to dig out the rest in a few days’ time, but Hawkins was insistent that the job should be done at once. It was already dusk – but he made them fetch candles and lamps, and work on through the night. Eventually, the rocky strata bearing the fossil were laid out in pieces on a wagon, ready to be transported to Hawkins’ home on the farm. It took him several weeks to chip away the rock to release the whole animal, but in the end he was confronted by an ichthyosaur measuring some 7 feet (2 metres) from nose to tail. The hunks of rock bearing the skeleton were assembled together in a wooden frame, and the result was an entire animal – or almost entire. Whatever was missing, Hawkins created out of plaster that he carefully stained to match the rest of the rock. This gave a convincing result – at least, it did for anybody who wanted to be impressed by the entire creature. For the palæontologists of the time, it posed problems. If you were not certain whether the fossil was entire, it was impossible to tell the real fossil from the replacement plaster, so describing the skeleton accurately would be scientifically invalid.
None of this mattered to the irrepressible and domineering Hawkins. Within a few weeks he had himself forgotten which parts of a fossil were original and which he had created from plaster. The creature looked impressive in its apparent completeness, and that was all that mattered to him. His wish was not to pursue scholarship, but to exhibit monsters from a bygone age. If they had pieces missing, he felt it his duty to bring them back to a state of perfection – only then could their prehistoric magnificence be appreciated. His is a very modern attitude. Present-day palæontologists think nothing of recreating vast skeletons of imaginary dinosaurs from plastic, when in reality only a very few bones have been discovered. What was considered unprofessional in Hawkins’ time is carried out on a grander scale today.
In 1833 Hawkins heard that an ichthyosaur skeleton had emerged on low-lying rocks at Lyme Regis. He travelled to the town, and discovered that it could be accessed only at low tide. Hawkins paid a guinea for the finder to grant him the right to own the fossil (£1 1s, now worth about £60 or $80) and told him to assemble a group of workmen, ready to excavate the entire skeleton. He could not resist telling Mary Anning of his find, and she warned him that the rock in which this fossil lay was likely to crumble as it dried. She said it was marl, and she knew that it was rich in iron pyrites (fool’s gold, FeS2). For the next few days no work took place – storms blew in from the west and the beaches were suddenly inaccessible.
By the time the sky had cleared and the winds had dropped, Hawkins was desperate to extract his new fossil from the beach. At low tide the men were sent to work, and they managed to dig out a large hunk of rock which contained the entire skeleton. It was taken to Hawkins’ home where he set to work with his ‘magic chisel’, and within weeks it was ready for display. Any parts that were missing were created out of the plaster, so the finished result owed as much to Hawkins’ creative impulses as it did to nature. By this time, he was spending the winter months in London, mingling whenever he could with the great palæontologists of the day, and he soon managed to become acquainted with William Buckland. Buckland expressed admiration for Hawkins’ fossil collection. He was particularly impressed by the pristine cleanliness of the specimens Hawkins had prepared and also by their astonishing completeness. Hawkins was delighted, and carefully cultivated the relationship, talking always of the might of the Creator, the power of nature, and the evil intent of these denizens from the unfathomable past. These fossils represented grim brutes, he insisted, lusting for blood. Encouraged by Buckland, Hawkins soon set about writing up his discoveries for publication. Many of them appeared in his first book, which came out in 1834.47
The text was filled with imprecations about the majesty of the creation, and the evil of the monsters that mankind had overcome. He solicited Buckland’s support for a proposal to sell his fossil collection to the British Museum for £4,000 (now about £200,000 or $240,000). The management would have none of it, and asked for external opinions as to the real value. Buckland was recommended as a referee by Hawkins, and Mantell was also asked to provide a valuation. Buckland totted up the individual specimens, and provisionally said they were worth between £1,000 and £1,500. Eventually, he decided upon £1,250 as the right price. Mantell separately sent in his own valuation; it came to almost exactly the same sum of money. Doubtless the two men had discussed the total between them, for surely this could not have been coincidence. They wrote to Hawkins, who replied in his oleaginous and glowingly complimentary tone, praising both men for their scholarship and wisdom, and proposing that – as a gesture of his own generosity – the price could perhaps be £2,300. Eventually, after further argument, Hawkins reluctantly accepted £1,250.
Henry Riley and Samuel Stutchbury found fossils of Thecodontosaurus