No sooner were the specimens in the museum’s possession in 1835 than the Keeper of Natural History, Charles König, began to make arrangements for them to go on display. His first choice was a magnificent specimen of an ichthyosaur measuring 25 feet (7.5 metres) long. Everything was immaculate, and the skeleton was perfect in every detail. Naturally, König was concerned; no fossil is ever likely to be entirely complete. Yet nothing seemed to be wrong with the skeleton. Curiously, he looked again at the illustration that Hawkins had printed in his catalogue of the collection – and suddenly he could see something odd. The original lithograph showed that the skeleton had not been complete when Hawkins had first illustrated it. Half the tail was missing, and the right forelimb was shown only as a dotted outline, indicating that it was not present when the fossil had been found. The ‘perfect’ skeleton had been made up with dyed plaster. Hawkins had protested in his negotiations that his perfect specimens were all genuine, and were testimony to his skill as a conservator, but it was suddenly clear how he had been improving on nature. Buckland and Mantell were both informed immediately, since König now felt that the specimens were worth far less than the museum had paid. He wrote to say that the fossils could not be put on display after all, since so much was plaster, and said that he would await further instructions. Buckland, against all expectations, rose to the defence of Hawkins. He insisted that no suggestion had ever been made that the specimens were entirely natural. It was only to be expected, he went on, that repairs here and there were necessary in restoring a skeleton, and there was definitely no hint of ‘fraud or collusion’ on his part.
None of this debacle helped the museum’s reputation, which was already being investigated by an inquiry set up by the House of Commons. When König came before the committee, he was cautious about the whole affair, admitting that the skeletons were less than perfect, and agreeing that the price of £1,250 may have been a little more than the fossil collection was worth. Hawkins railed against König, accusing him of pretending that the specimens were imperfect, when in fact all such specimens had merely been cosmetically improved. Mantell thought that Hawkins had been guilty of double-dealing, but put it down to mental instability. The specimen, along with others from the collection, is in the collections of the Natural History Museum in London, identified as Temnodontosaurus platyodon. You can still see tiny indentations all over the specimen. These are the dents left by the point of König’s knife, as he probed to distinguish between plaster and stone. All the plaster additions were subsequently painted to be subtly different, and this reveals that – in addition to the forelimb and the tail – many of the ribs, the tips of the hindlimbs, and even a vertebra, had all been constructed out of plaster by Hawkins. In truth, the skeleton is partly faked and was worth considerably less than a perfect specimen.
Not only was Hawkins unreliable as a conveyor of fossils, but in his writing he frequently substituted his own invented Latin names for those already granted to the fossils he found. He often complained that neither Latin nor Greek was good enough for naming fossils – the language in which they should be named, he insisted, was Hebrew. On he rambled, and soon published a second book, with yet more of his startling revelations. The book has an extraordinary style and is virtually unreadable. Here, for example, is a passage from Chapter V:
The sublime discloses itself only in the silence of which we speak, when, by the most stupendous Efforts of Intellect, by the revivification of Worlds, by the inhabitation thereof of all the Creatures which the labouring Soul can re-articulate, we stand in a Presence which has not, nor ever shall have, one sympathy with ourselves; those Worlds, those antipodal Populations, that Presence passion less, and silent dead; I say the instruments of a few bones verify a Sublimity before which no man can stand unappalled.
And so it drones on, perhaps the most impenetrable prose in the history of science.48
When Hawkins heard of the findings of the House of Commons Committee and its report on the part-plaster skeletons, he immediately threatened to sue for defamation. He was given to litigation. Thus, when a visitor at a nearby property casually picked some fruit from his strawberry patch, Hawkins was accused of using ‘disproportionate violence’ in protesting. He ended up in a legal dispute, meanwhile declaring himself the Earl of Kent.
Richard Owen was becoming increasingly intrigued by the reports of fossilized giant reptiles, and knew of some bones that had been described by an amateur palæontologist, John Kingdon, in a communication to the Geological Society of June 1825. Most learned opinion at the time was still that these were fossils of familiar creatures – porpoises, perhaps, or possibly extinct crocodiles – but Owen was an experienced anatomist and was certain this was wrong. In 1841 he decided the newly discovered fossils represented reptilian animals and he named the genus Cetiosaurus. He was only half right – although Owen had correctly determined that these were reptiles, he concluded they were swimming creatures, somewhat like plesiosaurs, which is why he coined the name cetiosaur from the Greek κήτειος (kèteios, sea-monster). Owen wanted to learn more, and one day late in 1841 he hastened to 15 Aldersgate Street, near St Paul’s Cathedral, to visit his colleague William Devonshire Saull, a businessman and an avid collector of antiquities. Saull had amassed a collection of 20,000 specimens (most of them antiquities from the Middle East) which he had carefully catalogued and labelled. Many were of geological specimens, and some – the important specimens that Owen wanted to inspect – were fossils. Saull was a long-standing friend of Mantell, and they had often exchanged specimens. Among the many relics Saull showed him, Owen picked up a piece of Iguanodon bone, and turned it over in his hands. He knew of the various other gigantic specimens that collectors had unearthed – Megalosaurus, Mososaurus, his own Cetiosaurus – and was suddenly inspired. These were not just creatures from the past, reminders of now-extinct worlds populated by animals like those of the present day; Owen became convinced that these all belonged to a single great family of reptiles. He suddenly realized that they were different from all the other reptiles we knew. Whereas present-day lizards have sprawling legs that splay out either side, these giant reptiles had downward-pointing limbs that functioned like columns to support their weight on dry land. He speculated that dinosaurs might have been warm-blooded, and he noted that they had five vertebræ fused to form the pelvic girdle, which he knew was not the case with other reptiles. Later discoveries would show he wasn’t entirely correct (some dinosaurs have different numbers of fused sacral vertebræ), but he was right to recognize these as a new group of huge, extinct monsters. This was a crucial breakthrough, and Owen decided to announce his conclusions at the eleventh annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science.
These bones of a young Iguanodon were excavated from Cowleaze Chine on the Isle of Wight and were included by Richard Owen in his monumental work A History of British Fossil Reptiles published by Cassells of London between 1849 and 1884.
The presentation took place on August 2, 1841, on a grey, dank day in London. Owen was a tremendous draw; Cuvier had died in 1832 and Owen had now become Europe’s most renowned zoologist. He had lectured on fossil reptiles before, but this time was different – this was to be his announcement of an entire new class of gigantic reptiles. He began by courteously acknowledging the pioneering discoveries made by William Buckland and Gideon Mantell, both of whom he acknowledged with respect. Then he reviewed what was known about crocodiles, and their similarities to plesiosaurs. 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