Too Big to Walk. Brian J. Ford
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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 at Clifton near Bristol in 1834, and their paper illustrated the jaw, teeth, part of the ilium, vertebræ and a rib (bottom). The genus was not recognized as a dinosaur until 1870.
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