Too Big to Walk. Brian J. Ford
of geologists, and his published works range from the description of fossil marine reptiles to the study of British stratigraphy. He also wrote learned textbooks dealing with the application of geological survey methods. However, he became best known by the public for his talent as a cartoonist. In one of them he satirizes the likes of Buckland and Lyell. This cartoon appeared in 1830, the same year in which Lyell’s great, ground-breaking formal book on geology was published in London. In this mighty work Lyell discussed stratigraphy, dealt with the value to commerce of systematic prospecting, arguing that the forces that were acting in nature today were the same as those that had acted in the past, and asserted that they would be the same in the future (the theory that pretentiously became known as uniformitarianism). When Charles Darwin set off on his voyage aboard HMS Beagle in 1831, it was Lyell’s new book that accompanied him on his geological expeditions.28
In 1830 Henry de la Beche, the first director of the Geological Survey of Great Britain, painted this historic watercolour representation of prehistoric life based on Mary Anning’s discoveries. He entitled it: Duria Antiquior – A more Ancient Dorset.
The French fossils that Cuvier had dismissed as being from a crocodile had meanwhile yet to be properly identified. In June 1793, a zoologist named Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire had become one of the first 12 professors at the newly opened Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris. His principle concern was setting up a zoo, but the following year he had struck up a relationship with Cuvier and they published several joint papers on the classification of animals. Fossils were also discussed. In 1807 Saint-Hilaire was elected to the French Academy of Sciences and concentrated thereafter on the study of the anatomy of invertebrates, corresponding at length with his British friend Robert Edmund Grant. His assistant, a young undergraduate who was particularly interested in barnacles, was a medical school drop-out named Darwin – Charles Darwin. Saint-Hilaire was concerned that Cuvier had too hastily concluded that Streptospondylus was a crocodile, and so he examined the fossils again. He decided that they belonged to two species of extinct reptile, and named them Steneosaurus rostromajor and S. rostrominor. In England, Megalosaurus was already officially recognized as a genus, though it still had no species name. It was a German palæontologist, Ferdinand von Ritgen, who gave it the provisional name Megalosaurus in 1826. He called the species Megalosaurus conybeari, though this name was never formally adopted.29
In 1827 Gideon Mantell resolved to include this fossil animal in his geological survey of south-eastern England and felt it appropriate to name it in honour of Buckland. It has been known as Megalosaurus bucklandii ever since. This was a crucial step in the history of science: it was the first dinosaur name formally to enter the literature of science. Suddenly, dinosaurs were real.30
These new areas of investigation were now attracting increasing attention. The Geological Society of London was inaugurated on November 13, 1807, at the Freemasons Tavern in Great Queen Street, and Buckland was elected their president in 1824–1825 and again in 1840–1841. He had been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1818 and became a member of their Council from 1827 to 1849. Buckland’s interest in spreading the word led to his involvement in the newly formed British Association for the Advancement of Science, and in 1832 he was appointed their president and chaired the second conference. By now, Buckland was riding high.
The limestone and chalk quarries at Maastricht continued to provide specimens for collectors, and indeed the final 6 million years of the Cretaceous are known to this day as the Maastrichtian epoch. In spite of his studies of fossil mammals – including extinct species, like mammoths – Cuvier steadfastly refused to accept the concept of evolution. To him, species were immutable, and he substantiated this notion by comparing mummified cats and dogs from ancient Egypt and showing that these creatures were unaltered when compared with present-day specimens. Frozen carcasses of woolly mammoths had first been excavated by explorers in the 1690s, and the first scientifically documented example was discovered in the mouth of the River Lena, Siberia, by a Siberian hunter named Ossip Schumachov in 1799.31
Schumachov saw these carcasses as a viable source of tusks that he could sell on to ivory traders, but Johann Friedrich Adam, a Russian explorer who later changed his forename to Michael, went at once to inspect the newly discovered frozen carcass. He found that much had already been devoured by wolves. Even so, it provided the most complete mammoth skeleton ever found and was assembled at the Zoological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, where it was mounted alongside a skeleton of an Indian elephant.
This substantiated that animals could become extinct and that skeletons of preserved carcasses were similar to the fossilized remains that were excavated elsewhere. Cuvier documented his fossil skeletons, and in 1812 he published his research, serving to dignify the study of fossils. The Maastricht fossil was a lizard as big as a crocodile, and the pterodactyl he distinguished from birds or bats, insisting it was a flying reptile. These were exciting conclusions that were already causing consternation and interest among scientists and writers. It was now clear that there had been eras when strange and unfamiliar creatures roamed the Earth32 and in Bleak House, which Charles Dickens started writing in 1852, he said it would be ‘wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill.’
The resonances of these fossils in present-day thinking were alluded to by Reverend Charles Kingsley, when he published a serialized story in MacMillan’s Magazine each month from August 1862 through to March 1863.
French palæontologist Louis Figuier published his La terre avant le deluge (the world before the flood) in 1863 and it became immensely popular. His illustrator, Edouard Riou, portrayed an Iguanodon and a Megalosaurus fighting with each other.
Did not learned men, too, hold, till within the last twenty-five years, that a flying dragon was an impossible monster? And do we not now know that there are hundreds of them found fossil up and down the world? People call them Pterodactyles: but that is only because they are ashamed to call them flying dragons, after denying so long that flying dragons could exist.
The stories were popular, and were brought together into a single volume in 1863. As a classical moralistic tale for children it has remained in print ever since.33
What was becoming increasingly apparent was the curious consistency in the way rocks had been laid down. This new science began with Friedrich August von Alberti, born in 1795, when he attended a military academy in Stuttgart and took up geology as a hobby. Later he took up employment in the salt production plant at Rottweil, an exquisite medieval town that has still changed little since the 1500s. (This is the place after which Rottweiler dogs are named; they are believed to be the direct descendants of the military breed that Roman soldiers brought during the invasions by the Caesars.) In 1815 Alberti came to recognize the occurrence of three characteristic strata composed of sedimentary deposits. He regularly found three distinct layers: one of red sandstone, capped by chalk, and succeeded by black shales. They occur throughout Germany and were later found to extend across the whole of northwest Europe. In each he found the same characteristic types of fossils and, from the Latin trias (meaning trio), he coined the term Triassic.34 We can now date this geological period as extending from 252.17 to 201.3 million years ago, for this is when the first dinosaurs appeared. The Jurassic period starts where the Triassic leaves off, and that is when dinosaurs first reached their enormous size.
Shortly after Alberti had coined the term Triassic, Jean Baptiste Julien d’Omalius d’Halloy in Belgium recognized the Cretaceous. Born in 1783 in Liège (now in Belgium, but then in the Austrian Netherlands), d’Halloy was sent by his wealthy family to study literature and the classics in Paris. He wanted none of it – geology became his consuming passion. He attended many lectures given by the distinguished naturalists and geologists and he learned everything he could from Georges Cuvier. He loved studying the rocky structure of France, and being of independent means he could travel as widely as he wished. In 1808 he published a learned paper entitled ‘Essai sur la géologie du Nord de la France’ in the Journal