Oxford’s History of Dinosaur Discoveries

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Saturday, 13 July 2024

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This blog post was written and researched by MOX volunteer Iulia Costache.

Iulia Costache is a Cowley Road resident keen on social research, community and writing. She is a Monitoring and Evaluation consultant with a background in Psychology and Anthropology. An aspiring poet, she often frequents Oxford Poetry Library’s workshops and events. She writes historical blogs around a myriad of topics, but she is particularly interested in diversity, identities and Oxford’s world-leading innovations, contributions and discoveries.

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William Buckland’s Megalosaurus

William Buckland (1784 – 1856) was a theologian, geologist and palaeontologist, born in Axminster, Devonshire, who is often credited as being the first to make a scientific description of a dinosaur. From a young age he developed an interest in fossils, collecting Ammonites and other shells with his father. In 1801, he was granted a scholarship to Corpus Christi College at Oxford to study classics and theology. He graduated with a BA in 1805 and received his MA in 1808, being ordained as a priest a year later. During this time he attended lectures taught by John Kidd on mineralogy and chemistry. In 1813, he took up Kidd’s position incorporating geological and palaeontological content into his teaching, and thus becoming the first reader in geology. His lectures were well-attended by students and senior university members alike, mostly due to the liveliness of their nature, featuring dramatic gestures, horseback riding and even acting out certain animal behaviours.

Photograph of large dinosaur jaw with teeth

Megalosaurus lower jaw

It was at this time that he also became the unofficial curator of the Ashmolean museum, expanding the museum’s collection whilst also growing his own. Several specimens in the museum’s collection had been found in a quarry which was used to make roof tiles in Stonesfield, a small village north of Oxford. Among these, a femur bone, some bits of vertebrae and part of a lower jaw piqued Buckland’s interest, specifically in identifying the large creature that these belonged to. He commissioned the naturalist Mary Morland (whom he later married in 1825) to illustrate the specimens and sent them to the renowned French anatomist, palaeontologist and zoologist Georges Cuvier for examination. After a visit to Oxford in 1818, Cuvier and Buckland concluded that the bones belonged to an enormous lizard. Buckland and his friend William Conybeare, dubbed it as ‘Huge Lizard’, which the latter rendered to Greek as Megalosaurus. At the 1824 annual meeting of the Geological Society of London, Buckland presented a paper on the scientific description of the Megalosaurus, which contained Morland’s illustrations. The official status of the genus was recognised in the Transactions of the Geological Society of London, which appeared a few months later.

Buckland came close to missing being the first to publish a dinosaur and rushed to print following a visit to the collection of Gideon Mantell (doctor and geologist), which also included large fossils. What Mantell believed he had on his hands were the remains of an Iguanodon, a herbivorous reptile. This theory was not a very popular one at the time. He consulted his peers, including Cuvier and Buckland, who dismissed him and misidentified the fossils as belonging to rhinoceros and fish, respectively. Buckland encouraged him to delay publication until he had further evidence and took the opportunity to publish the Megalosaurus first. Cuvier later recognised that the fossils likely belonged to a herbivorous reptile and Mantell published a paper on it in 1825. Conybeare suggested the name Iguanodon to Mantell and he decided to take it forward. Regarding Megalosaurus, Buckland had only given the genus a name, as it was the fashion at the time to take priority. It was Mantell, in his 1827 Geology of the southeast of England, where he attributed the species with its current binomial name Megalosaurus bucklandii.

There were other dinosaurs discovered in Oxfordshire, namely the Cumnoria, Eustreptospondylus and Cetiosaurus, which all belonged to the Middle-Late Jurassic Period.

How dinosaurs dodged an unfortunate naming convention

Descriptions of large bones have been found in literature prior to the 17th Century, however, information about them is limited, and thus it is difficult to draw conclusions of what these texts were truly about. Historian and naturalist Robert Plot is sometimes attributed to have recorded the first ever accidental depiction of a dinosaur bone, with an accompanying illustration, in his work the Natural History of Oxford-shire (1677). Plot, born in 1640 in Borden, Kent, began studying at Magdalen Hall in 1658 and subsequently received his BA, MA, and a civil law degree in 1661, 1664 and 1671, respectively.

Painting of a seated man in a long brown curly wig and red cloak

Robert Plot

He had long been interested in studying natural history systematically, and, under the patronage of John Fell (bishop of Oxford) and Ralph Bathurst (University vice-chancellor), Plot set out to capture the natural history of a single county, beginning with the one that he was currently living in at the time – Oxfordshire. The book was an overnight wide-reaching success, which led to him not only becoming Oxford’s first professor of Chemistry, but it may have confirmed the belief that Elias Ashmole held (the founder of the Ashmolean Museum), that Oxford was the predestined place where his collection should reside. Ashmole recommended that Plot should be the first keeper of the Ashmolean Museum. He was the only ever individual to ever hold both positions simultaneously. The Ashmolean Museum opened up in 1683 in what is currently the History of Science Museum, in Broad Street. It was the first museum in England to admit public visitors, a highly controversial decision at the time. Alongside the collection of curiosities, the building also housed the School of Natural History on the ground floor, and a chemical laboratory – the first of its kind in England, in the basement.

The aforementioned bone described could be found amongst the many curious objects on display at the museum. The fossil had been given to Plot by one Sir Thomas Pennyston, who had found it in a quarry in Cornwell, Oxfordshire. At the time, the science of fossils was not yet well established and Plot tended to disagree with fellow contemporaries who claimed fossils to be the remains of once-living beings. Instead he thought that fossils were crystallised mineral salts that took certain shapes by coincidence, referring to them as “formed stones”, and were part of God’s grand design, meant to capture human admiration and educate. However, in this instance, he correctly identified the Cornwell bone as part of a femur of an enormous creature. With it being far too large to be attributed to any living being, he theorised that the bone might have belonged to an elephant brought to Britain by Roman invaders. However, after comparing the Cornwell fossil to elephant bones in 1676, he determined that the two were too different to derive from the same animal, and concluded, incorrectly, that the specimen must have belonged to a giant man or woman.

Almost a century later, Richard Brookes depicted the Cornwell fossil again in his book A New and Accurate System of Natural History (1763) in a more schematic manner and inverted the figure, describing it clearly as “the lowermost part of the thigh-bone of a man”. However, within the illustration page the image of the Cornwell bone was accompanied by the caption “Scrotum humanum”. It is unclear why the description of the fossil in text and the caption of the illustration are different. Some have theorised that the illustrator could have gotten confused by Brookes’ observation that “other stones have been found exactly representing the private parts of a man,” which preceded the description of the fossil on the page, and captioned it as such. This misunderstanding was later taken on seriously by some writers, most notably French philosopher and naturalist Jean-Baptiste Robinet, who claimed that he could identify musculature preserved in the specimen and a cavity which resembles a urethra, and concluded that it could not be a fossil, but instead a stoney formation developed from mineral germs.

A drawing of a femur bone and a copy of the front cover of a book

The cover of Robert Plot’s Natural History of Oxfordshire, 1677 (right). Plot’s illustration of the lower extremity of the femur dubbed “Scrotum humanum” (left)

Since this unfortunate misunderstanding, palaeontologists have been amusing themselves with the name Scrotum Humanum. In the 1970’s, Beverley Halstead, eccentric professor of Geology and Zoology (he liked, as Buckland did, to act out animal behaviours, but, in his case, dinosaur mating during scientific presentations), published a paper arguing that Scrotum Humanum should be the name used for Megalosaurus bucklandii. He pointed out that the former name had been associated with a non-avian dinosaur first, and that, according to the rules of the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN), it meant that Scrotum Humanum had priority over Megalosaurus bucklandii. However, the rules also stated that the name could be regarded as a nomen oblatum, or “forgotten name,” as it had been out of use since 1899. Thus, the genus could remain Megalosaurus bucklandii, until 1985, when the issue was brought up again as the ICZN removed its nomen oblatum clause. William A.S. Sarjeant, friend of Halstead (at this point deceased), petitioned to formally suppress Scrotum Humanum, by making Megalosaurus bucklandii a conserved name. Philip K. Tubbs, Executive Secretary of the ICZN, dismissed the petition, on the grounds that Scrotum Humanum was never intended to be more than the label of an illustration.

While the lower part of Buckland’s Megalosaurus jaw can be found on display today at Oxford’s Museum of Natural History, Plot’s bone has been lost in time. There was an attempt between February 2020 and December 2021 by palaeontologists Darren Naish and Martin Simpson and zoologist Paul Stewart to track down Plot’s bone, after the latter noticed that a bone similar to Plot’s was on display in the Ashmolean Museum. This newfound bone originally belonged to the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, and its features, when compared to the original illustration, closely resembled Plot’s femur. Eventually, after weighing this specimen, it was concluded that, because it weighed half as much as it should have, they had not, in fact, stumbled across Plot’s bone. The search continues…

References:

https://www.oxfordhistory.org.uk/broad/buildings/south/museum_histsci.html

https://www.americanscientist.org/article/american-dinosaurs-who-and-what-was-first

https://www.ashmolean.org/history-ashmolean

https://www.oum.ox.ac.uk/learning/htmls/plot.htm

https://tetzoo.com/blog/2022/12/12/robert-plots-lost-dinosaur-bone

https://www.strangescience.net/plot.htm

https://www.ashmolean.org/story-worlds-first-public-museum-0

https://www.extinctblog.org/extinct/2023/9/12/weird-early-history-of-paleontology

https://oumnh.ox.ac.uk/megalosaurus-0

https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/dinosaur-started-craze

https://www.geolsoc.org.uk/Geoscientist/Archive/May-2012/Losing-the-Plot