The quarries of southern England continued to reveal strange new forms of prehistoric life, and often the excavations began with digging into the base of a cliff comprising the desired minerals. One such quarry had been dug out of the cliffs during the 1850s at Black Ven to the east of Lyme Regis. The owner was James Harrison who lived in Charmouth, and who excavated the area for high-quality Charmouth mudstone that dates from the late Sinemurian stage, about 191 million years ago, and was destined for burning into cement. Once in a while, the workmen would retrieve a bone, and these fossils were kept safely as interesting curiosities. Harrison often took them home and displayed them on the mantelpiece or in the hallway for the interest of guests. A surgeon and amateur geologist, Henry Norris, visited Dorset on vacation and became friendly with Harrison. Norris pointed out that these fossils could be important, and even valuable. So, in 1858 the two men sent a parcel containing some broken bones to Owen at the British Museum (Natural History) in London and asked for his opinion. The most conspicuous was a left femur that Owen realized was different from anything previously recorded. He formally described it in 1859, naming the genus Scelidosaurus. Owen’s intention was to name it from the same Greek word from which the word ‘skeleton’ is derived, σκέλος (skelos, hindlimb), because of the strong femur he had examined, but he confused it instead with σκελίς (skelis, rib of beef). He made a mistake: the new dinosaur should have been named Scelodosaurus.
James Harrison, a Dorset quarry manager, discovered this skull of Scelidosaurus harrisonii after it was excavated in mudstone destined for the cement furnace. It was purchased by Henry Norris and published by the Palæontological Society in 1861.
Harrison later retrieved a portion of the tibia and fibula of this creature, then a claw, and finally a skull, which Owen formally described in 1861, naming this species Scelidosaurus harrisonii in honour of its discoverer. When the rest of the dinosaur had been excavated, it revealed a surprisingly complete skeleton. Although the tip of the animal’s snout was missing, the skull and jaws were intact, and the pelvis, ribs, hindlimbs and most of the vertebræ were retrieved. Of the forelimbs (and the end of the tail) there was no sign, but otherwise it was an incredible find. The body of Scelidosaurus measured about 13 feet (4 metres) long and was covered with a protective shield of bony scales or scutes, hundreds of which had survived, with many still in roughly the original position. This was the most complete dinosaur skeleton ever found, yet Owen carried out hardly any further investigation. This dinosaur was later described by the prominent American palæontologist Othniel Marsh, who erroneously assumed it had long legs, but not until the 1960s was it further investigated. Acid treatment was used to help release the scutes from their stony matrix, but the entire fossil has yet to be completely recovered. After nearly 160 years, this fascinating fossil is still waiting to be fully described.
These are stories with endless fascination, and they have attracted the attention of innumerable authors and even some movie producers. In 2002 the story of the pioneering British work on dinosaurs became the subject of a television movie produced by National Geographic, The Dinosaur Hunters. Henry Ian Cusick played Gideon Mantell and Rachel Shelley played his wife Mary. Alan Cox was Richard Owen, Michelle Bunyan his wife Caroline; Mary Anning was portrayed by Rebecca McClay and William Buckland by Michael Pennington. The movie was well received and remains available online.2
Beachcombers were now so abundant in England that they were sometimes teased for their eagerness. A cartoon for Punch magazine in 1858 showed a beach scene dotted with bizarre objects that look like barnacles; closer inspection shows they were day-trippers in petticoats, all bending over to search for fossils and seashells. That same year, William Dyce, a leading landscape painter, created his detailed picture Pegwell Bay, Kent – a Recollection of October 5th, 1858, which showed an autumnal beach scene with his family gathering specimens from the beach. Dyce was a student of geology and astronomy, and had painted the same bay before. This painting includes finely detailed studies of the chalky cliffs, while, high in the heavens, he captures the faint image of Donati’s comet to commemorate the widespread public interest in such phenomena. By this time, people were buying microscopes and telescopes as never before, and the popular understanding of science was burgeoning.
Searching for wildlife and fossils on the beach became such a popular pastime in Victorian England that cartoonist John Leech published this portrayal of beachcombers in Punch magazine in 1858. Their hooped skirts were reminiscent of giant barnacles.
While this excitement was spreading in Britain, new dinosaurs were being discovered in mainland Europe, and in 1859 a German physician and part-time palæontologist, Joseph Oberndorfer, acquired an exquisite little skeleton to add to his collection. He lived in the Riedenburg-Kelheim region of Bavaria, surrounded by quarries where a remarkably smooth and small-grained limestone was obtained. These layers had been laid down some 151 million years ago in a vast shallow lagoon, forming strata with so fine a grain that in 1798 a method was discovered for using the rock to produce flawless lithographic plates for printers. (To this day, lithographers speak of working ‘on the stone’ even though plastic and metal have long since replaced the German stone slabs.) From time to time, the local quarrymen used to find the remains of creatures trapped in the limestone, and the skeleton of a small dinosaur was perfectly preserved in the thin slab of rock that Oberndorfer obtained. He passed the fossil over to Johann A. Wagner, Professor of Zoology at the University of Munich, who had made extensive studies of mammalian fossils (including mammoths and mastodons) and who was delighted to be able to describe and name a new dinosaur. He decided to call it Compsognathus longipes from the Greek κομψός (kompsos, delicate) and γνάθος (gnathos, jawbone). The specific epithet longipes comes from the Latin longus (long) and pes (foot).3
When W.F.A. Zimmerman published Le monde avant la creation de l’homme (The World Before the Creation of Man) in 1857, this engraving entitled ‘Primitive World’ by Adolphe-François Pannemaker was the frontispiece.
This was a momentous discovery, for it was the first complete skeleton of a carnivorous theropod dinosaur ever to be discovered, and it was also one of the smallest. It measures about 3 feet (90 cm) long and would have been the size of a swan. In 1865 Oberndorfer sold the specimen to the Bavarian State Institute for Paleontology and Historical Geology in Munich, where it is on display to this day. Curiously, we can still see its food: there is the skeleton of a small lizard still visible within the abdomen. When Othniel Marsh examined it in 1881 he concluded that it must have been an embryo within a female Compsognathus, though it was later accepted that it was the remains of a meal – lizards would have been a probable prey for a dinosaur like this. At the time, nobody realized that this was a raptor, in essence one of the tribe to which giants like Poekilopleuron and Megalosaurus belonged. Nothing more was found of this genus until 1971 when a second, somewhat larger, skeleton was retrieved from the lithographic limestone of Canjuers north of Draguignan, in Provence. This one measures 4 feet (125 cm) long and was quickly given a new species name Compsognathus corallestris, though this is almost certainly just a younger example of C. longipes. This second specimen was acquired in 1983 by the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris, where it is on public display. This diminutive dinosaur was interpreted as a fierce little hunter, and in 1997 its digital re-creation was given a prominent role in The Lost World: Jurassic Park.
An exquisitely preseved specimen of Compsognathus longipes, a small theropod the size of a goose, was published by Johann Andreas Wagner in 1861. It had been discovered in limestone deposits from Riedenburg-Kelheim in Bavaria.
In England, Owen was preoccupied with the foundation