Who Discovered the First Dinosaur? Quarry Workers, a Country Doctor and a Feud

The oldest illustrated dinosaur bone in the scientific record was described in 1677 by Robert Plot, the first keeper of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, who published a drawing of the lower end of a thigh bone from a quarry in Cornwell. Plot recognised it as part of a very large animal's femur and, since no known creature was that size, concluded it belonged to a giant human, an interpretation that fitted both classical accounts and scripture. The specimen is lost, but the engraving is detailed enough for modern palaeontologists to identify it as a Megalosaurus. A century later the same conclusion was being drawn elsewhere, and the general framework of the age simply had no category for an extinct group of enormous reptiles, so the finds were sorted into the categories available: giants, whales, crocodiles and the victims of the flood.

The first dinosaur named scientifically was described in 1824 by William Buckland, Oxford's first reader in geology and a man of famous eccentricity who ate his way through as much of the animal kingdom as he could obtain. Working with jaw and limb material from a quarry at Stonesfield and advised by the French anatomist Georges Cuvier, Buckland published the animal as a giant lizard, estimating it at twelve metres and interpreting it as a land-dwelling carnivorous reptile. That combination was itself the important claim, since Cuvier had recently established that extinction was real and that the fossil record contained animals with no living representatives, which gave Buckland a framework the earlier finders lacked. He did not yet imagine anything but an oversized lizard crawling on splayed legs.

The second was described by Gideon Mantell, a doctor in Lewes in Sussex who collected fossils in every hour he was not working and eventually ruined himself doing it. The traditional story has his wife Mary Ann finding the first teeth in a pile of roadstone in 1822 while he visited a patient, an account Mantell told in different versions and which may be embellished; what is certain is that he acquired teeth unlike anything known, that Cuvier initially dismissed them as rhinoceros incisors, and that Mantell persisted. The breakthrough came from comparing them with the teeth of a living iguana at the Royal College of Surgeons, which they resembled closely except in being twenty times the size. He published the animal as Iguanodon in 1825 and, crucially, argued that it was a plant eater, which meant the ancient world had contained not just huge predators but whole ecosystems of huge animals.

By 1841 three of these animals were known, Megalosaurus, Iguanodon and the armoured Hylaeosaurus, and Richard Owen, the most powerful anatomist in Britain, argued in a report to the British Association that they shared features setting them apart from all living reptiles and should be recognised as a distinct group. He published the name Dinosauria, terrible lizards, in 1842. The features he identified were partly right and partly self-serving:

• •Vertebrae fused to the pelvis, a genuine shared character that still helps define the group
• •Limbs held beneath the body in a pillar-like posture rather than splayed out, which was correct and revolutionary
• •Large size and terrestrial habit, which are not diagnostic
• •An inference that such advanced animals must have had high metabolic rates, which Owen used to argue against the idea that life had progressed steadily from simple to complex, since here were reptiles more advanced than modern ones
• •The name and the framing made Owen the public face of the subject, and he ensured the credit did not go to Mantell, whose work he repeatedly disparaged in print

The two men's rivalry was bitter and one-sided. Owen held institutional power, controlled publication and review, and renamed or reattributed several of Mantell's discoveries; Mantell, in chronic pain from a spinal injury after a carriage accident, sold his collection to pay debts and died in 1852 of an opium overdose. Owen wrote an unsigned obituary describing him as a mediocre talent, and a piece of Mantell's spine was preserved in the Hunterian Museum, in an institution Owen had run. Owen's own reputation suffered later, partly through his opposition to Darwin, and he is remembered now chiefly for founding the Natural History Museum in London, which is a substantial legacy whatever his conduct. The animals themselves were presented to the public in 1854 as the concrete sculptures at Crystal Palace, built by Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins under Owen's direction: heavy, four-footed and lizard-like, wrong in almost every particular, and still standing in south London as the first attempt anyone made to show people what these creatures looked like.

Fossil bones were found and misinterpreted for centuries, including a thigh bone illustrated by Robert Plot in 1677 and read as a giant human's. The first scientific description was William Buckland's Megalosaurus in 1824, followed by Gideon Mantell's plant-eating Iguanodon in 1825, identified by comparing its teeth with a living iguana's. Richard Owen recognised the shared features and named the group Dinosauria in 1842, taking the public credit while undermining Mantell, and the Crystal Palace sculptures of 1854 gave the public its first, entirely inaccurate, look at them.