of present-day sloths, and concluded that this was another kind of gigantic ground-dwelling sloth. He decided to name it Megatherium. These were two crucial papers – first, they demonstrated the value of comparative anatomy, and they also established the view that there were huge forms of life which no longer existed. The young Cuvier ensured that the idea of extinct giants was formally established, and his two lectures set the science of palæontology onto a firm footing.
In 1784 an Italian philosopher, Cosimo Alessandro Collini, reported on a curious fossil that had been dug out of the smooth, creamy Solnhofen limestone in Bavaria. The fossil was part of the cabinet of curiosities in the palace of Charles Theodore, Elector of Bavaria at Mannheim, and it had perfectly preserved wings. Collini concluded that these were the remains of a sea creature with huge fins, though a French/German naturalist named Johann Herman insisted that the fossil represented some kind of bat. Collini heard of Cuvier’s growing interest in fossils, and wrote to him about it, and by 1801 Cuvier had concluded that the fossil represented a flying reptile. He gave it a name we recognize today: ptero-dactyle. Other investigators continued to debate its true nature; it was sometimes claimed to be a bird, a catfish, or a lizard. Not until the 1860s was the nature of a pterodactyl – as a winged reptile – generally agreed.2
It was also Cuvier who recognized the true nature of Johann Scheuchzer’s fossilized skeleton; in 1812 he correctly identified it as a fossil salamander. Until that time the petrified remains had been accepted by every scholar as evidence of a drowned man from the biblical flood, and it fell to the French philosopher’s genius to reveal the truth. The specimen had been purchased by the Teylers Museum in Haarlem, the Netherlands, in 1802 and it remains there on display to this day. It was formally named Salamandra scheuchzeri by a German botanist, Friedrich Holl, in 1831.
Cuvier’s work was widely disseminated and in 1799 it came to the attention of a physics professor in the Netherlands, Dutch scientist Adriaan Gilles Camper. He had been contacted by both Hoffmann and Drouin about the ‘monster of Maastricht’ to resolve whether it truly was a fish, a crocodile or a sperm whale. The fossil had remained a mystery and in England it had become a topic of fascination for James Parkinson, a young and enthusiastic physician with a passion for geology. Parkinson didn’t enjoy trudging over rocks and was no great enthusiast for fieldwork. He obtained most of his specimens from the London dealers and eventually amassed a collection of over 3,000. Parkinson became Britain’s leading palæontologist.
Meanwhile, an enthusiastic student of rocky strata was a young resident of southern England who spent much of his time collecting in the field. This bright young man was Gideon Algernon Mantell, born in Lewes, Sussex, on February 3, 1790, an enthusiastic youngster destined to study medicine and eventually to become a leading obstetrician. Although medicine was to be his profession, his enduring passion was the study of fossils. During Mantell’s childhood, words like geology, scientist and palæontology were largely unknown. There was, however, nothing new about the term fossil. It derives from the Latin fossilis, the past participle of the verb fodere, ‘to dig’, and once meant anything excavated from the ground. It acquired its modern-day meaning in the 1730s, some 70 years after Robert Hooke was writing about fossils in his book Micrographia.
The young Mantell was keen to meet the great James Parkinson, but the enthusiasm was not reciprocated for several years. This was frustrating for a budding enthusiast, for there were few scientific publications that one could study. Parkinson was persuaded that it was time to publish a formal account, and he compiled three majestic folio volumes entitled Organic Remains of a Former World, each extensively illustrated. They were published in London in 1804, 1808 and 1811 – the last being the same year in which Gideon Mantell graduated from St Bart’s Hospital in London. In later life, the elderly Parkinson was more inclined to meet Mantell, and eventually they became firm friends. Parkinson wrote:
I am totally ignorant of the science [of fossils] which teaches us their natural history … I find myself so totally ignorant of their origin, as not even to know in what class of nature’s works to place them.3
This was an honest reflection of the degree of understanding at the time, and his three volumes represent an impressive collation of what was then known. There are separate sections dealing with fossilized shells and familiar marine creatures, of course; and he went on to describe fossils of what he concluded were whales, crocodiles, elephants, mastodons, and even several rhinoceroses. Petrus Camper, the Dutch physicist, had by this time speculated that perhaps a fossil he had found was the skull of a giant monitor lizard, and in 1808 Cuvier agreed. Cuvier published an engraving of what he called ‘the large fossil animal of the quarries of Maastricht’ and he decided to name it Mosasaurus, after the River Meuse, near where it was found.4
Parkinson later reproduced the illustration as Plate XIX Fig. 1 in his own book. The original specimen taken back to Paris by Napoleon’s troops is still on display at the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle in the Jardin des Plantes, though the Netherlands authorities have recently been demanding its return.
Nobody dwelled on the significance of these early finds; the fossilized remains of seashells continued to be taken by everybody as proof of the biblical story of the flood. Similarly, when three-toed dinosaur footprints were found preserved in rocky strata, they were conventionally regarded as the marks left by the raven that Noah had sent out looking for land. The significance of these fossil remains lay in verifying the Bible. Without an understanding of prehistory, those biblical interpretations were the obvious first point of reference. Quarrymen and miners used to keep fossils, knowing that they might be sold to collectors. In 1676 a curious stone relic was discovered in the Stonesfield quarry in Oxfordshire, a place that was eventually to become a leading source of fossils for the Victorian palæontologists. It was a strange bilobed object and was purchased by Sir Thomas Pennyston, who later agreed to present it to Robert Plot at Oxford. At that time, Plot was still busily setting up the Ashmolean Museum and he published a report on the find in his Natural History of Oxfordshire in 1677.
I have one dug out of a quarry in the Parish of Cornwell, and given me by the ingenious Sir Thomas Pennyston, that has exactly the Figure of the lowermost part of the Thigh-Bone of a Man or at least of some other Animal, with capita femoris inferiora, between which are the anterior … and the large posterior Sinus: and a little above the Sinus, where it seems to have been broken off, shewing the marrow within of a shining Spar-like Substance of its true Colour and Figure, in the hollow of the Bone. In Compass near the capita femoris, just two foot, and at the top above the sinus measures about 15 inches: in weight, though representing so short a part of the Thigh-Bone, almost 20 pounds.5
His suggestion that this came from an animal proved to be prescient, and for a time he interpreted the bone as coming from a Roman war elephant, though his later interpretation was that it came from a gigantic human.6 Philosophers at the time accepted that 10-foot (3-metre) giants had lived in the past, for they were mentioned in the Bible.7
What Plot was describing was actually the end of a fossilized long-bone. His published engraving is the first we have of a dinosaur bone, even though nobody at the time realized its significance. Plot himself was an enthusiastic naturalist and collector who met many of the luminaries of his day and carefully cultivated their acquaintance. Plot saw himself as Britain’s answer to Pliny the Elder; just as Pliny had written his Natural History, so Plot resolved to publish a Natural History of his own that would commemorate his lifetime’s work.8
Plot’s description of the fossil was meticulous, though he did not assign a scientific name to the specimen. His illustration was re-published by Richard Brookes in 1772. Brookes was a physician and naturalist who wrote a great many books on British wildlife, and his desire to categorize species correctly obliged him to find a suitable designation. Considering its appearance, and disregarding Plot’s attempt at a detailed description, it seemed to Brookes that he knew what it was. There was only one name that unambiguously summed up its appearance: in the fourth volume of his New and Accurate System of Natural History he boldly named it ‘Scrotum humanum’. It certainly looked like one.9
This fossil was found in the