With some understatement that belied the months of feverish excitement, Gideon Mantell stated that the Tilgate beds in the Weald were ‘one of the most important series of deposits’ that he had uncovered. He attempted to catalogue the extraordinary fossils of the giant bones. Under the heading ‘Fossil Lacertae [Lizards]’ he wrote: ‘the teeth, vertebrae, bones and other remains of an animal of the Lizard Tribe of enormous magnitude are perhaps the most interesting fossils that have been discovered in the County of Sussex’. He described the characteristics of the sharp, curved carnivorous teeth and provided measurements of fragments of vertebrae and ribs, which were, he said, ‘decidedly analogous to those of the Lizard Tribe’. Other bones were also listed: the head of the radius (forearm), metacarpals (bones of the hand) and a thigh bone. ‘Some fragments of a cylindrical bone, probably the femur, indicate an animal of gigantic magnitude,’ he observed. ‘I have specimens from ten to twenty-seven inches long and from eleven to twenty-five inches in circumference, the substance of the bone being more than two inches thick.’
Recognising from the herbivorous teeth that he had evidence of a second type of giant creature different from the carnivorous Oxford monster, but perhaps not liking to court controversy by suggesting he had found a herbivorous lizard, he classified other giant bones under a different heading: ‘Teeth and Bones of Unknown Animals’. He wrote: ‘a brief description of these fossils is here inserted not in the hope of being able to elucidate their nature, but to record their existence in the Tilgate Forest with a view to future enquiries … [The teeth] are of a very singular character and differ from any previously known.’ He had the crown of the teeth only, he explained, unattached to the jaw. Although they were worn, some specimens were 1.4 inches long: ‘when perfect these specimens must have been of a very considerable size’.
Mantell even pointed out the analogy between the fossils of Tilgate and those of Stonesfield in Oxfordshire. Perhaps in a gentle spur to Professor Buckland, he wrote ‘the Stonesfield limestone has long been celebrated for the extraordinary character of its fossils, of which however, no detailed account has yet appeared before the public’. With the assistance of Mr Charles Lyell ‘and aided by an interesting collection of Stonesfield fossils for which I am indebted to his liberality,’ he continued, ‘I have been able to ascertain that the following organic remains occur in both deposits:
The teeth, ribs, and vertebrae of a gigantic animal of the Lizard Tribe.
Bones and plates of several species of Tortoise.
Teeth of a species of Anarhicas [wolf-fish].
Scales of Fishes and Lizards.
Bones of Birds? and of Quadrupeds [unknown]’
In his conclusion, Mantell stated boldly that entombed in the hills of Sussex ‘there are one or more gigantic animals of the Lizard Tribe’.
Although he could not name the creatures or have any clear conception of the kind of beast he was describing, this was the first attempted scientific description of dinosaur remains correctly identified as giant lizards. It was a vivid snapshot of a wondrous unknown past. ‘We know not the millionth part of the wonders of this beautiful world,’ he wrote. ‘It is the pleasing task of the geological inquirer … to discover order and intelligence in scenes of apparent wildness and confusion … to recognise a series of awful but necessary operations by which the harmony, beauty and integrity of the universe are maintained … which must be regarded as wise provisions of the Supreme Cause.’
As he proudly received the first printed copy at the beginning of May 1822, he had high hopes that this would prove a turning-point in his career. ‘I am resolved to make every possible effort to obtain that rank in society to which I feel I am entitled both by my education and my profession,’ he wrote in his journal. Surely, fired by these strange findings, some rich patron would step forward; his endless round of medical duties that took up so much of his time would, perhaps, soon be a thing of the past? At the very least, he hoped that his labours would be well received by the prestigious London societies: the Royal Society and the Geological Society.
Soon after the publication of his book, Mantell took some of his Sussex fossils to a meeting of the Geological Society in Covent Garden. The worn teeth of the giant herbivore were carefully wrapped in cloth. It was a long and tiring journey to London by chaise, stopping several times to change the horses, before he found his way to the House of the Geological Society at 20 Bedford Street. The Reverend William Buckland, now the Vice-President of the Society, had come down from Oxford with his friend the Reverend Conybeare. William Clift, Conservator of the Hunterian Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons, was also present.
Mantell’s diary and his subsequent accounts reveal that after the business of the meeting was completed, he showed these experts some of the worn, brown teeth from his unknown herbivorous animal. ‘I was discouraged by the remark that the teeth were of no particular interest,’ he wrote. The experts did not agree with Mantell that the ‘tooth’ belonged to an ancient herbivorous lizard. Far from such an exotic and fanciful verdict, they claimed: ‘There is little doubt the teeth belonged either to some large fish, allied to “Anarhic[h]as lupus” or wolf-fish, the crowns of whose incisors are of a prismatic form, or were mammalian teeth obtained from a diluvial [recent] deposit.’
Thus the combined wisdom of these august members of the Geological Society was that the tooth on which Mantell had pinned all his hopes belonged to nothing more exotic than a recent mammal such as a rhinoceros or an oversized fish! Mantell felt their dismissive lack of interest keenly. How could anybody build a reputation on a large fish? There was only one person there who dissented from the expert verdict – William Hyde Wollaston – and he happened to be the only person present who was not a geologist.
The scepticism of the experts at the Society stemmed from the fact that they did not accept Mantell’s classification of the strata of the Weald as Secondary rock. His conclusion that he had found a giant herbivorous lizard could be wrong if his interpretation of the Tilgate beds as ancient Secondary rock was incorrect. Numerous mammalian remains had been found in the more recent Tertiary rocks which lay above the Secondary strata: mammoths, elephants, rhinoceros and hippopotamus. If the Weald rocks in Sussex were Tertiary, then the giant fossils within them, far from belonging to some improbable species of herbivorous reptile, were much more likely to be from any of these large mammals. To persuade the experts that he had indeed found an ancient reptile, he had first of all to prove beyond doubt that the Tilgate beds were Secondary rock.
The eminent members pored over the details of Mantell’s findings and tried to fathom whether the limestone and sandstone of the Tilgate Forest were part of the ‘Purbeck’ formation, or ‘Ferruginous sand’, ‘Greensand’, ‘Iron-sand’ or ‘Hastings sand’. Their task was made all the harder since the names for the Sussex strata were not yet standardised and everyone was using different terms for the various layers, adding to the bewilderment. For Mantell, with each learned utterance from the experts the years of painstaking work were falling away, the exotic lizards of mythical proportions fast fading into nothing more than a figment of his imagination. He was just a country doctor, after all.
There was good reason to be confused when trying to place the strata of the Tilgate Forest into the geological sequence. Unlike the Stonesfield rock near Oxford where the fossils were found deeply buried, the rock at Whiteman’s Green in the Weald was inexplicably close to the surface. Was this, as Mantell claimed, a protrusion of older, Secondary rocks? Or was it a recent deposit, perhaps of Tertiary or even younger alluvial rocks, as Buckland thought. In Fossils of the South Downs Mantell made no attempt to conceal his perplexity about the exact position of the strata in which he had found his giant reptiles. Although he had correctly identified the Tilgate Beds as Secondary, he did admit that the precise ‘geological position of these beds [within the Secondary series] is involved in much obscurity and cannot at present be satisfactorily determined’.
Faced with the disbelief of the Geological Society, shortly after this meeting Mantell made