The Forgotten Story of the Man Who Discovered Dinosaurs

 

In 1822, Gideon Algernon Mantell, a country doctor in Sussex, uprooted and irreversibly changed the course of history by discovering the first evidence of dinosaurs. However, before we dive into Mantell’s discovery, let’s look back at the world of dinosaurs before Mantell. About 145 years prior in 1677, an English naturalist named Robert Plot had included an illustration of a giant bone in his book full of artefacts, called The Natural History of Oxford-shire. At the time, Plot believed that the giant bone wasn’t a fossil from a living organism, but rather the bone from a giant. Plot also believed that most fossils were crystallizations of mineral salt. Plot, however, had found the first dinosaur bone not even knowing what he had discovered. Plot’s bone was the femur of a Megalosaurus, and this giant discovery went right over everybody’s heads. Even though the occasional dinosaur bone discovery came and went through the next 145 years, nobody had discovered dinosaurs until of course Gideon Algernon Mantell and his wife came along to change that.

Mantell: Liked by Nobody

Gideon Algernon Mantell was unfortunately not the best scientist to work with. He was self-absorbed, vain, priggish, and even treated his family with disregard. However, what Mantell lacked in human necessities, he made up for it in his devotion to paleontology. When Mantell was young, he was fascinated by geology despite his Methodist father wanting to put him into a dame school. With his father steering him into a medical career, Mantell obtained an apprenticeship with a local surgeon for five years. Afterwards, Mantell began his formal education in England with the inheritance from his deceased father. In 1811, Mantell had obtained his diploma as a Member of the Royal College of Surgeons. In his free time, Mantell would occupy himself with his love for geology, even working with fellow geologists that helped Mantell discover more every day. In 1820, he discovered bones larger than those discovered by William Buckland, who would eventually take the credit for the first dinosaur discovery. However, in 1822, Mantell’s devoted wife, Mary Mantell, found something of interest that she had thought Gideon may like.

The Giant Realization

On that evening in 1822, Mrs. Mantell had just gone for a stroll in Sussex since Mr. Mantell was on a house call with a patient. While Mrs. Mantell walked down a nearby lane, she came across a small, curved brown stone lying in a pile of rubble that was used to fill potholes. She observed it carefully, and decided it would be of interest to Mr. Mantell since he was so dedicated to geology. She took it back to him, and he could immediately see that it was something of interest. Mantell knew it was a fossilized tooth of some sort, and that it was worth studying in order to understand it’s history. Mantell studied it and had a shock realization that he knew would change everything about our planet’s history. Mantell’s studies concluded that the small, fossilized tooth belonged to a herbivorous reptilian, one that was tens of feet long. While this on its own would be incredible, Mantell had also concluded that the reptilian creature was from the Cretaceous period, which would be the first documented proof of dinosaurs that the world had seen. However, at the same time, Mantell’s friend William Buckland had already found dinosaur bones as well and was just about to release his own documentation. The race was on.

A Race Against the Clock

Even though the race between Buckland and Mantell wasn’t a literal one, the two still studied the history of dinosaurs for the next three years. After his initial realization, Mantell had been told by Buckland to work with caution and not with haste. Listening to Buckland, Mantell spent the next three years working on his studies for the dinosaur tooth he had found. Mantell decided to send the tooth to Georges Cuvier in Paris for further inspection. Cuvier was known as the “father of paleontology” and actually dismissed Mantell’s tooth for belonging to a hippopotamus. While doing research at the Hunterian Museum in London, a fellow researcher had told Mantell that the tooth looked like it belonged to South American iguanas that he was studying. Mantell believed the South American iguana theory with a hasty comparison, and the creature became known as Iguanodon. Mantell prepared his work and was ready to turn it into the Royal Society for review, when the unfortunate news hit Mantell. William Buckland had already discovered dinosaurs, one that he named the Megalosaurus. While Buckland’s report didn’t have much detail or description, it was still known as the first documentation of dinosaurs despite Mantell’s report being far more deserving.

While William Buckland first discovered the Megalosaurus bones in 1815, his report that took nearly nine years to complete wasn’t full of much insight or details regarding the Megalosaurus. On the other hand, Mantell took three years to complete his report full of insight and detail regarding the Iguanodon, yet history has seemed to forget about him despite his report being far more deserving of recognition and respect. Another recent discovery like this story is the discovery of a supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way. Scientists Andrea M. Ghez and Reinhard Genzel both independently studied this black hole and each independently led teams of astronomers to study it since the 1990s. They were both awarded half of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics, which is a lot more fair compared to Mantell’s situation. So, even though William Buckland was credited first for the discovery of dinosaurs in 1822, do you think that the modern science community would be fairer today like with Andrea M. Ghez and Reinhard Genzel’s shared Nobel Prize? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

 

Works Cited

“Science Red in Tooth and Claw.” A Short History of Nearly Everything, by Bill Bryson, Broadway Books, 2003, pp. 84–88.

“Gideon Mantell.” Rocky Road: Gideon Mantell, www.strangescience.net/mantell.htm.

Epifani, Mike. “The First Dinosaur Fossil Was Named Before We Had A Word For Dinosaurs.” Discovery, 1 Aug. 2019, www.discovery.com/science/First-Dinosaur-Fossil-Name.

“Robert Plot.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 26 Jan. 2021, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Plot.

“The Nobel Prize in Physics 2020.” NobelPrize.org, www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2020/press-release/.