Rob Hope (France)
A break from work, and also from reading about the history of palaeontology, enabled me to get away for a while. And a chance visit to the south of England found me driving through the lovely Sussex town of Lewes. Held up by a red light, I suddenly realised – didn’t Gideon Algernon Mantell once live here?
I parked the car and set off to visit this charming town. In particular, I wanted to find the house where Mantell had actually worked and lived. When I eventually found it, there was a large blue plaque on the wall confirming it to be the home of the ‘discoverer of the Iguanodon’ (Fig. 1).
Fig. 1. Outside Mantell’s home.
This animal was discovered 1822, which was a fascinating period and one about which I have read a lot recently. Perhaps too much, for I more-than-half expected the doctor himself to step outside, dressed in Victorian garb, to shake my hand:
Mantell’s cabinet of curiosities was vast. Many of his fossils (which were later sold to the British Museum) were held in this very house, before being moved to a new home in nearby Brighton in 1833.
His hunting ground for fossil remnants were mostly the nearby, grand Cretaceous chalk quarries, and also the sandstones of Tilgate Forest (from the Wealden Formation). I ventured to investigate (and eventually found) the landscape where, according to legend, Mantell’s wife, Ann, had picked up a large fossil tooth, almost 190 years ago.
Gideon Mantell sought desperately to identify the unusual fossil, requesting aid from William Buckland and even the French anatomist, Baron Cuvier… But to no avail.
Several years later, a chance meeting in the Hunterian Museum with naturalist, S Stutchbury, solved Mantell’s frustrating enigma. For all the world, the fossil seemed like a giant iguana tooth. Could Mantell be, along with Buckland (who had just found and named Megalosaurus), one of the first to discover and interpret some kind of huge ‘lizard’ fossil?
It was indeed to be the case.
In 1825, Gideon Mantell published a paper describing Iguanodon. Many years before, comparative anatomist, Richard Owen, from London’s Natural History Museum, had named a new group of ancient animals as “Dinosauria” (see, for example, ‘The Isle of Wight dinosaurs’ by Dr S Sweetman in Issue 19 of Deposits). And so, Iguanodon became a modern icon of British palaeontology.
My chance visit through the land of Gideon Mantell also took me to the Booth Natural History Museum, in Brighton (Fig. 2; and see also Jon Trevelyan’s article Geology museums of Britain: The Booth Museum of Natural History, Brighton).
Fig. 2. Booth Natural History Museum, Brighton.
Here, in a secluded corner of this fascinating museum, are several Iguanodon fossils from the South Downs area. Sadly, it is unclear whether these remarkable specimens were once part of the Mantell collection. However, tantalizingly, all of the musty and faded tickets glued to each fossil had descriptive writings seemingly in the distinctive nineteenth century mode of handwriting. Had this small group of Iguanodon fossils been actually found by Gideon Mantell? I could just make out the wording on one of the tickets as ‘a cast’. So maybe these were, in fact, copies of his fossils?
I wanted to find out and, like the great man himself who had urgently sought to identify his first dinosaur specimen, here I was, seeking to identify the history of these fossils and, indeed, to whomthese fossils had once belonged. I enquired at the entrance of the building, but the curator of the museum was, just like me, away on holiday.
All of those fossils were remarkable, but one stood out – the ‘thumb spike’ (Fig. 3).
Was this (or the cast of it?) the very fossil that had inspired Owen, when he was preparing life-size dinosaur replicas for London’s Great Exhibition of 1851? He placed the ‘spike’ on the Iguanodon nose, as a horn, and not on the hand as a thumb, as was later shown to be the case. (Initially, just one fossil ‘spike’ had been found and it was not articulated.)
Perhaps yes… perhaps no. This fossil remains, nevertheless, remarkable.
Will there be a sequel to this story? Maybe, but it doesn’t matter. It’s good to have a break sometimes, to simply get away and have an opportunity to actually see the areas and fossils we so often only read about.
A break from work, and also from reading about the history of palaeontology, enabled me to get away for a while. And a chance visit to the south of England found me driving through the lovely Sussex town of Lewes. Held up by a red light, I suddenly realised – didn’t Gideon Algernon Mantell once live here?
I parked the car and set off to visit this charming town. In particular, I wanted to find the house where Mantell had actually worked and lived. When I eventually found it, there was a large blue plaque on the wall confirming it to be the home of the ‘discoverer of the Iguanodon’ (Fig. 1).
Fig. 1. Outside Mantell’s home.
This animal was discovered 1822, which was a fascinating period and one about which I have read a lot recently. Perhaps too much, for I more-than-half expected the doctor himself to step outside, dressed in Victorian garb, to shake my hand:
Mantell’s cabinet of curiosities was vast. Many of his fossils (which were later sold to the British Museum) were held in this very house, before being moved to a new home in nearby Brighton in 1833.
His hunting ground for fossil remnants were mostly the nearby, grand Cretaceous chalk quarries, and also the sandstones of Tilgate Forest (from the Wealden Formation). I ventured to investigate (and eventually found) the landscape where, according to legend, Mantell’s wife, Ann, had picked up a large fossil tooth, almost 190 years ago.
Gideon Mantell sought desperately to identify the unusual fossil, requesting aid from William Buckland and even the French anatomist, Baron Cuvier… But to no avail.
Several years later, a chance meeting in the Hunterian Museum with naturalist, S Stutchbury, solved Mantell’s frustrating enigma. For all the world, the fossil seemed like a giant iguana tooth. Could Mantell be, along with Buckland (who had just found and named Megalosaurus), one of the first to discover and interpret some kind of huge ‘lizard’ fossil?
It was indeed to be the case.
In 1825, Gideon Mantell published a paper describing Iguanodon. Many years before, comparative anatomist, Richard Owen, from London’s Natural History Museum, had named a new group of ancient animals as “Dinosauria” (see, for example, ‘The Isle of Wight dinosaurs’ by Dr S Sweetman in Issue 19 of Deposits). And so, Iguanodon became a modern icon of British palaeontology.
My chance visit through the land of Gideon Mantell also took me to the Booth Natural History Museum, in Brighton (Fig. 2; and see also Jon Trevelyan’s article Geology museums of Britain: The Booth Museum of Natural History, Brighton).
Fig. 2. Booth Natural History Museum, Brighton.
Here, in a secluded corner of this fascinating museum, are several Iguanodon fossils from the South Downs area. Sadly, it is unclear whether these remarkable specimens were once part of the Mantell collection. However, tantalizingly, all of the musty and faded tickets glued to each fossil had descriptive writings seemingly in the distinctive nineteenth century mode of handwriting. Had this small group of Iguanodon fossils been actually found by Gideon Mantell? I could just make out the wording on one of the tickets as ‘a cast’. So maybe these were, in fact, copies of his fossils?
I wanted to find out and, like the great man himself who had urgently sought to identify his first dinosaur specimen, here I was, seeking to identify the history of these fossils and, indeed, to whomthese fossils had once belonged. I enquired at the entrance of the building, but the curator of the museum was, just like me, away on holiday.
All of those fossils were remarkable, but one stood out – the ‘thumb spike’ (Fig. 3).
Was this (or the cast of it?) the very fossil that had inspired Owen, when he was preparing life-size dinosaur replicas for London’s Great Exhibition of 1851? He placed the ‘spike’ on the Iguanodon nose, as a horn, and not on the hand as a thumb, as was later shown to be the case. (Initially, just one fossil ‘spike’ had been found and it was not articulated.)
Perhaps yes… perhaps no. This fossil remains, nevertheless, remarkable.
Will there be a sequel to this story? Maybe, but it doesn’t matter. It’s good to have a break sometimes, to simply get away and have an opportunity to actually see the areas and fossils we so often only read about.