Too Big to Walk. Brian J. Ford
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entire country produced anywhere. It was an astonishing achievement. Smith’s conviction that rocks could be systematically studied arose from his awareness of the increasing interest in fossils. Whereas most people regarded them as objects of curiosity, Smith saw them as indicators of a hidden reality – the key to unravelling the strata on which Britain was built. Smith had clear sight and a methodical mind, and created lyrical literature. In 1796, he wrote this prescient prose:
Fossils have been long studied as great curiosities, collected with great pains, treasured with great care and at a great expense, and shown and admired with as much pleasure as a child’s hobby-horse is shown and admired by himself and his playfellows, because it is pretty; and this has been done by thousands who have never paid the least regard to that wonderful order and regularity with which nature has disposed of these singular productions, and assigned to each class its peculiar stratum.
The first geological map of Britain was published by William Smith, a self-educated surveyor, in 1815. It was over 8 feet (2.6 metres) long and was based on an outline map by John Cary. This was the first geological map to cover such a large area.
Smith fell into debt whan an agreement to provide stone for a customer could not be fulfilled. He raised £700 by selling his fossil collection to the British Museum but was confined in the debtor’s prison for the remaining £300. After his release in 1819 he worked as surveyor for Sir John Johnstone, who soon appointed him land steward to the family estate in Hackness near Scarborough. Johnstone was astonished at Smith’s knowledge, and encouraged him to design the Rotunda, a display of the geology of the Yorkshire coast with strata all shown in their correct order in curved cases. This remarkable building survives to the present day, and is the oldest geological museum anywhere in the world.
Gideon Mantell was also conversant with Smith’s map, and Mantell entered into deep discussions with others interested in rocks. For instance, he became friendly with a mining engineer named John Hawkins who was similarly interested in the strata that surrounded them. Other friends were George Bellas Greenough, who was working towards his own map of Britain’s rocky strata, and James Sowerby, who encouraged the young Mantell to publish a book that would extend and refine the results for Sussex published in William Smith’s pioneering map.
The year 1816 was a crucial watershed for Mantell. He married Mary Ann Woodhouse, a talented young artist, and took on a new post as surgeon at the Royal Artillery Hospital in nearby Ringmer, Sussex. He also published his first scholarly work that year, a book on the minerals in the area around Lewes. Next, he published a magazine article on the rocky strata of southeast Sussex. By this time he was starting to become prominent among the fossil hunters. When Colonel Thomas James Birch decided to auction his entire fossil collection for the benefit of Mary Anning, it was to Mantell that he wrote in March 1820, saying: ‘The sale is for the benefit of the poor woman and her son and daughter at Lyme, who have in truth found almost all the fine things which have been submitted to scientific investigation. I may never again possess what I am about to part with, yet in doing it I shall have the satisfaction of knowing that the money will be well applied.’
It was also in 1820 that Mantell heard of a new source of fossilized bones – the quarries in Tilgate Forest near Crawley, Surrey, some 10 miles (16 km) to the north of Cuckfield, from where most of his specimens had come. He travelled by one-horse chaise and stayed at the Talbot inn, which stands to this day, and from there he rode over to the quarries. Pieces of rock had been set out by the quarrymen for him to peruse and perhaps purchase, and he took a selection to study. We remember the men in palæontology much better than the womenfolk, but – just as Mary Anning regularly provided new and exciting specimens for them to study – Mantell later wrote that he owed his greatest leap forward to his wife, when she stumbled across a find that would finally launch the science that we now know as palæontology.
A devotee of Smith’s geological revelations was Gideon Mantell, an obstetrician and a brilliant amateur fossil hunter, who in 1822 first named a fossil dinosaur – Iguanodon. The fossils were originally thought to be those of a rhinoceros. In 1816 Mary Woodhouse married Gideon Mantell and became his co-worker. She was an accomplished artist and prepared many illustrations for publication. It has been said that Mary was the first to discover iguanodon teeth.
It was the summer of 1822, and Mary Ann was travelling with her husband en route to one of his patients at home. By the side of the road, she noticed a chunky fossil on a pile of discarded rubble and showed it to her husband. It was a huge tooth. This was the crucial discovery, and Gideon launched a full-scale investigation of the Tilgate Forest quarries, looking for more. Mantell did not record until 1827 that he had first been presented with that huge tooth by his wife, but – although they could not know this at the time – this was the tooth of an Iguanodon, a dinosaur that we now know measured 43 feet (13 metres) long and weighed some 4 tons. Other specimens were excavated by a quarryman, Mr. Isaac Leney from Cuckfield, and a selection of fossils was soon amassed. Clearly, they could only have come from a huge animal, and Mantell became increasingly excited.40
By the end of 1822 Gideon Mantell had at least half a dozen of these specimens, so he travelled to Paris the following year and showed them to Cuvier, who formally identified the specimens that the Mantells had collected as ‘the teeth of a gigantic crocodile, the teeth of a rhinoceros [and] bones of an herbivorous animal’ – in reality, the ‘crocodile’ was Megalosaurus and the ‘herbivorous animal’ would eventually prove to be Iguanodon. Mary Anning had recently found a virtually complete Plesiosaurus skeleton, and this was put on display along with the ‘Megalosaurus or great Fossil Lizard of Stonesfield’ that Buckland had brought along, and which Parkinson had included in his book. It had been excavated at Stonesfield. Cuvier was less dismissive of this fossil, describing it as ‘a monitor [lizard] forty feet long and the size of an elephant.’
Gideon and Mary Ann Mantell worked together on their major volume on the fossils of the South Downs, and it was published at about the same date as Parkinson’s book. It was an important book and it launched a more systematic study of fossils. The Mantells’ new book received a royal endorsement from King George IV at Carlton House Palace: ‘His Majesty is pleased to command that his Name should be placed at the head of the Subscription List for four copies.’41
Most of the fine lithographs that Mary Ann meticulously prepared were of shellfish, though towards the end of the plates there were tantalizing glimpses of the scales of the skin of fossil fish, and also a reptilian jawbone, complete with teeth.
The first engraving of the Hylæosaurus fossil that the Mantells unearthed in the Tilgate Forest quarry in 1832 was redrawn & lithographed by F. Pollard for The Geology of the South East of England, which was published in London a year later.
It was the large fossilized teeth that Mary Ann and Mr. Leney had collected that continued to fascinate Gideon Mantell. He compared these teeth with those of an iguana in the collection of the Hunterian Society and became increasingly convinced that his fossils were from a gigantic version of a monitor lizard. He consulted others on his findings, and in 1824 Cuvier wrote again to concede that: ‘I believe they belong to the order of reptiles.’ Mantell was thrilled by this confirmation from such a well-accepted authority, and thought that he might name the creature Iguanosaurus. A colleague, William Daniel Conybeare, by this time dean of Llandaff in Wales and an active amateur collector, suggested that the name be modified. ‘The name you propose,’ he wrote, ‘Iguano Saurus, will hardly do because it is equally applicable to the modern iguana … Iguanodon (having the teeth of an iguana) would be better.’ Mantell agreed, and presented a paper to the Royal Society on February 10, 1825, entitled ‘Notice on the Iguanodon, a newly discovered fossil reptile, from the sandstone of the Tilgate Forest in Sussex.’ His Iguanodon was officially acknowledged as a gigantic prehistoric reptile, and he had drawn a sketch showing the bones they had retrieved superimposed on how he envisaged