This year marks the 200th anniversary of one of the strangest and most surreal moments in science. In February. 20, 1824, at the annual meeting of the Geological Society in London, the world was introduced to the first dinosaur: megalosaurus.
Before a packed crowd, Oxford geologist William Buckland shared details of a creature unlike anything “civilized” society had ever dared to imagine. It was so new, even the word “dinosaur” hadn’t been coined yet; that would take another 18 years.
Buckland “had nothing like a complete skeleton to show his fellow geologists, but he had seen enough bones and teeth for a mental reconstruction,” writes Edward Dolnick in his new book, Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party : How an Eccentric Group of Victorians Discovered Prehistoric Creatures and Accidentally Upended the World” (Scribner, out now).
Megalosaurus – a hybrid of two Greek words: megawhich means “giant” and saurusmeaning “lizard” – whose skeletal remains were discovered near Oxfordshire, England, was a “carnivore and a reptile” that stood “upright like a mammal” and was “more than twice the length of a crocodile and twice as massive as a rhino,” Buckland explained during his lecture.
Buckman, with his gift for oratory and showmanship, “painted a wonderful picture for his enthralled audience,” Dolnick writes. He also “taken for the stage”, imitating the unseemly movements of one of the largest carnivores of the middle Jurassic era. His audience, Dolnick writes, “screamed with delight.”
It is impossible to overstate how shocking this news was to the general public, which was “blind in a way that people in today’s world – who have known about ET research for decades – could never be.” Imagine living in a world where one morning every animal that ever existed still walked the earth and not much had changed since the story of the Garden of Eden in the Bible. But the next day you were told, “Oh, wait, we made a mistake. Giant flesh-eating lizards were here first, like something out of your worst nightmare.”
These Victorians were “the first generations to face the reality of dinosaurs,” Dolnick writes. And they responded with the same fascination and awe of any 6-year-old today. Dinosaurs were “the best kind of monster—big, scary and, best of all, dead,” Dolnick writes.
The theatrics of scientists like Buckman was essential at the time, given how few bones had been discovered and how little was actually known about the creatures they belonged to. It was a bit like solving a murder without a whole body. “Instead, more often than not, they only had a few bones or teeth, and their job was imagine a body of those few suggestions,” writes Dolnick.
The dinosaur bones weren’t exactly new discoveries, but the explanations were. Many of the same bones that Buckland imagined belonged to a megalosaurus had been found in the 17th century, unearthed by workers digging in a quarry about 20 miles from Oxford University, and scientists’ best guesses at the time were that they originated from an elephant, or even more absurdly, “a pair of large testicles from a bygone human giant,” writes Dolnick.
Dinosaur fossils became more common in the early 1800s, largely because “the Industrial Revolution brought a frenzy of excavations of all kinds,” Dolnick writes. The deeper the workers dig into the ground with picks and shovels, building ditches, tunnels and quarries, the more behemoth bones they begin to uncover. And each skeletal fragment brought the same questions: Whose bones were these?
The discoveries turned some of the scientists and fossil finders into celebrities. Like Gideon Mantell, a “handsome, charming country doctor,” writes Dolnick, from Sussex, south London. In 1822, he (or perhaps his wife, while accompanying him on a house call) came across some mysterious (and gigantic) fossil teeth in West Sussex.
Despite his discovery being repeatedly dismissed by palaeontologists as “not of particular interest”, he took the remains to London’s Hunterian Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons – named for the surgeon who inspired Mary Shelley’s mad scientist Victor Frankenstein. After comparing his find with the endless drawers of reptile teeth and jaws, Mantell realized that “his large fossil teeth looked remarkably like the small iguana teeth in every respect except size,” Dolnick writes.
He named this new creature “Iguanodon,“ a name still used today. “Like Frankenstein,” Mantell later wrote, “I was amazed by the gigantic monster which my investigations had, as it were, created into existence.”
Mantell continued to draw large, enthusiastic crowds who were “overwhelmed by the word of a 10-ton lizard,” Dolnick writes. But what’s remarkable wasn’t just what he discovered, by the way HOW he put the pieces of the puzzle together. “It wasn’t just that he had created a dinosaur out of some dirty teeth and some broken bones,” Dolnick writes. “The real coup was imagining such a beast in the first place. Excavating a dinosaur would be a feat; THE daydream a dinosaur was even better.”
Not all pioneers in the golden age of dinosaur fossils were so lucky. Mary Anning was a poor and uneducated young woman from a small town on the English Channel who hunted relics to raise money for her family. In 1812, while digging for fossils on a beach at Lyme Regis, she discovered the skeleton of a “huge dolphin-like creature, seventeen feet long…with huge jaws and fearsome teeth,” writes Dolnick. This “tyrant of the deep”, as one scientist described it, was later called ichthyosaurus (“fish lizard”), but Anning had no say in naming it.
“The names were given by scientists, not undocumented girls,” Dolnick writes. “A local landlady paid £23 to find it, and that was enough money to put food on the table for six months.”
Excitement over these strange new creatures reached a peak on New Year’s Eve, 1853. It was then that Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, a renowned artist and sculptor (and a showman in his own right), organized a party in South London to t ‘shown full size. replicas of some three dozen prehistoric creatures, including three dinosaurs, which he had personally created, and were later to be exhibited in an upcoming exhibition in London.
The party took place “inside a large, open model of a dinosaur,” Dolnick writes. Dozens of Britain’s leading scientists gathered around banquet tables inside “a life-size model of an iguanodon,” Dolnick writes. The beast’s back had been cut to make room for the tables. It was notable not only for its daring, but because it marked “the first time the public had ever laid eyes on dinosaurs as they might have been.”
Hawkins’ replicas of these prehistoric monsters were later moved to the Crystal Palace Dinosaur Park in South London, which opened in 1854 and attracted 2 million visitors a year. “In Victorian eyes, massive sculptures were as worthy of celebration as the steam engine or the locomotive or any other emblem of modernity and power,” Dolnick writes. They represented “an expression of successful conquest,” as historian Martin Rudwick described it. Which wasn’t entirely accurate, since humans didn’t appear for the first time until 65 million years ago AFTER the dinosaurs became extinct. So people in no way “conquered” them.
“But no one looks for logic in a toast,” writes Dolnick. “The dinosaurs were dead and we weren’t, and that was justification enough to raise a glass to the history of triumphant humanity.”
#dinosaurs #changed #science #society #Victorian #England
Image Source : nypost.com