The Complete Dinosaur

1

The Discovery of Dinosaurs

1

Dinosaurs: The Earliest Discoveries

David A. E. Spalding and †William A. S. Sarjeant (1935–2002)

The first trackers of dinosaurs were probably other dinosaurs, as tracks have been found apparently showing carnivorous species following herbivores (Lockley 1991, 184). More recently, there is evidence that some early people, whose livelihood came partly from tracking, killing, and dismembering animals, sometimes observed and found significance in tracks, bones, and eggs of long-extinct species of no culinary value.

Traditional knowledge of large fossils has been found to persist among aboriginal peoples on several continents. Pertinent observations have been documented, but often in sources that have not generally received the attention of paleontologists until recent decades. Dinosaur trackways in situ have apparently been marked by petroglyphs and pictographs of uncertain age, so that they can be seen to have been of some significance to their finders. Other specimens have been collected in ancient times and are now found in archaeological contexts. The surviving oral and published record is widely scattered through ancient, medieval, and later literature and appears in the forms of folklore, the tales of travelers, visual records of legendary events, and oral data collected and documented by anthropologists, dinosaur researchers, and aboriginal people. Prescientific cultures have offered a variety of explanations for the remains they observed ranging from mythological to protoscientific.

In this chapter we summarize what is known of early observations of dinosaurs, in approximately chronological sequence before the rise of modern paleontology, discuss the scientific discoveries which led to the naming of the first two genera, and mention the other genera named before Owen recognized a common identity among the remains in 1841.

Simpson’s classic paper (1942, 131) presents a framework for the history of fossil vertebrate discoveries. He recognizes a number of periods in North American vertebrate paleontology, of which we are here concerned with the first three. Simpson’s prescientific period includes early discoveries and removal of some specimens to Europe, but no truly scientific study . . . had been made. This period extends in North America from the earliest times to about 1762. Simpson’s protoscientific period extends from about 1762 to 1799, in which vertebrate paleontology was not yet a true science but basic methods were being invented and sporadically applied. In the pioneer scientific period (1799–ca. 1842), Cuvier established the subject as a true and defined science, while others adopted Cuvier’s methods. While there is room for discussion of the appropriate dates of application of the periods outside North America, Simpson’s structure provides a useful framework.

Other writers have extended and elaborated on Simpson’s approach, paying particular attention to the early beginnings of science in the Western world. Numerous classic dinosaur texts have been pulled together in Weishampel and White (2003). Surveys of early dinosaur discoveries have been published by Buffetaut and Le Loeuff (1993), Delair and Sarjeant (1975, 2002), and Sarjeant (1987, 1997, 2003). Recent books by Adrienne Mayor (2000, 2005) and Jose Sanz (1999), and papers by Mayor (2007) and Mayor and Sarjeant (2001) have addressed discoveries of fossils in ancient civilizations and ethnographic contexts, shedding much light on the beginnings of discovery and interpretation of fossil remains.

It is now clear that many dinosaur and other fossil discoveries have been made by prescientific societies. Some fossil discoveries are commemorated in place-names (Mayor 2007). Some are found only in archaeological contexts, for which no explanations are recorded. The record of the Mediterranean and Chinese civilizations documents ancient fossil discoveries, for some of which there is a written or even visual record offering contemporary interpretations. Ethnographic data from many cultures around the world show different interpretations of vertebrate fossil remains. Some myths of monsters may have roots in fossil discoveries, what Mayor (following Dodson) calls fossil legends for traditional tales that specifically refer to physical evidence (Mayor 2005, xxix). In some instances, logical explanations reflecting awareness of geological change, deep time, and ancestral relationships show the development of protoscientific ideas in nonscientific cultures. Medieval societies in Europe begin with the same variety of types of explanations for fossils. Through the Renaissance, more or less fanciful explanations are offered until the emergence of truly scientific methods and explanations came in the last two centuries.

Although history shows a broad evolution of interpretations of vertebrate fossils from legendary to protoscientific to scientific, the progression of ideas appears to be linear only when the most scientific are considered. For instance, less than four decades separate Noah’s Raven from Hitchcock’s Ornithoidichnites, but it is likely that the traditional views continued in folk belief in the area. Even in our own day, legendary and scientific explanations may be offered of the same occurrence by different segments of society. Thus the tracks (supported by associated forgeries) at the Paluxy River site of Dinosaur State Park, Texas, are viewed by creation scientists as proof of the contemporaneity of dinosaurs and humans before Noah’s flood (Morris 1980), while the same site is interpreted by paleontologists as showing Cretaceous sauropod and theropod tracks (Jacobs 1995). Forged human tracks from this site are documented as far back as 1939 and discussed in a context of other fossil-related puzzles by Mayor (2005, 302) as frauds and specious legends.

Ancient Asia

Perhaps the oldest evidence of human connection with dinosaurs comes from the Gobi Desert of Mongolia, where in a site ranging in age from late Paleolithic to early Neolithic Roy Chapman Andrews found bits of dinosaur egg shell, drilled with neat round holes – evidently used in necklaces by primitive peoples (Andrews 1943, 238; Carpenter et al. 1994, 1).

Dragons played an important part in Chinese lore as far back as the protohistoric period; two emperors are reputedly immediate descendents of dragons, and two azure-colored dragons are reported to have presided over the birth of Confucius. Dragons have been figured in Chinese art as far back as 1100 bc (Andersson 1934).

A possible connection between Chinese dragons and the fossil remains of dinosaurs was noted as early as 1886, when British/Tasmanian geologist and folklorist Charles Gould (1834–1895) drew attention to the Chinese dragon bones and figured an Iguanodon skeleton in his gathering of dragon myths (Gould 1886, 199).

Mayor (2000, 39) documents that the I Ching, a compilation drawing on older traditions going back to 1000 bc, includes as a good omen Dragons encountered in the fields and suggests that these refer to bones plowed up during agriculture. In the second century bc, bones (possibly of dinosaurs) found during digging of a canal in northern China led to it being called the Dragon-Head Waterway (Mayor 2007). A later report of dragon bones from Wucheng (now Santain County, Sichuan province) is documented by Cheng Qu during the period of the western Jin dynasty, ad 265–317, in a work entitled Hua Yang Goo Zhi (Needham 1959). Although dragon bones are generally from fossil mammals, Dong (in Dong and Milner 1988) considered it highly probable that these particular examples represented dinosaurs.

Large fossilized bones were found near Jabalpur in what is now Madhya Pradesh in India by W. H. Sleeman and reported by G. G. Spilsbury in the 1830s. These were not described until 1868 in Hugh Falconer’s posthumous memoirs or named until Richard Lydekker included some of the material in Titanosaurus indicus in 1877 (Barrett et al. 2008).

In the 1930s, in what was then Indochina, French geologist Josué Heilmann Hoffet reported a dinosaur caudal vertebra from near Phalane. Alerted by this discovery, the natives, who had often seen similar bones but had thought they came from buffaloes, told me about places where they thought such remains were to be found. . . . The bones belonged to genies, and evil would befall anyone who removed them (Taquet 1994, 148). The bones proved to be only limestones sculpted into bizarre shapes, though there were dinosaur bones in the vicinity. It was not until 1990 that new work was done in the area by Philippe Taquet, who located one of Hoffet’s local assistants. The near-scientific explanation – water buffalo was the largest mammal known to the locals – proved to be firmly intermingled with folkloric traditions, for the elders remembered that they filled forty-three baskets of bones of an ox called . . . the magnificent ox. . . . When they began to dig, there was a lightning storm . . . this was a . . . warning (155–156). Taquet found it necessary to buy a pig from the local priest and sacrifice it before he was able to proceed with his fieldwork (156).

Classical Mediterranean

Mayor (2000, 5) notes that Cuvier was well aware of fossil finds in classical times, but that such records have largely escaped the attention of scientists (and classicists) in more recent years. She has documented many references to discoveries of large fossil bones in the ancient world, from the Mediterranean east to India and China, in areas now known for their remains of fossil vertebrates. She shows that fossil bones were well known to inhabitants of many countries, were gathered in temples and other public places, and were often interpreted as remains of giants, monsters, legendary heroes, and other fantastic creatures.

1.1. Griffin and baby. Hammered bronze relief, ca. 630 BCE.

Drawing by Adrienne Mayor.

While many of these finds are undoubtedly attributable to proboscideans, cetaceans, and other mammals, some may reflect dinosaur discoveries. A remarkable trail of documentation points to the possibility that Gobi dinosaurs may have given rise to the legendary griffin (Fig. 1.1), which became a popular motif in Greece around 700 bc (This suggestion has, however, been criticized by specialists in Gobi dinosaurs; see, for instance, Novacek 1996, 140ff.), though the same author warms slightly to the idea later (2002, 296).

Later, around 430 bc, Herodotus, in pursuit of tales of flying reptiles in Egypt, made a special trip to see bones and spines in incalculable numbers, piled in heaps, some big and some small. Mayor (2000, 135) suggests these might have been spinosaurs, known from Egypt.

Mythical Monsters in Medieval Europe

In Europe, fossil footprints of dinosaurs and their progenitors were also linked to legends. While it is known that some dragon tales were inspired by bones of Pleistocene rhinoceros and bear (Buffetaut 1987, 13–14), it is also possible that footprints exposed in the Rhine Valley, Western Germany, may have inspired the story of the slaying of the dragon by the hero Siegfried (Kirchner 1941). When a footprint in Triassic sandstone of Chirotherium – the track maker was a nondinosaurian early archosaur – was incorporated into the stonework of Christ Church, Higher Bebington, Cheshire, England, it came to be known locally as the Devil’s Toenail. Many other dragon tales from Britain may ultimately derive from tracks or bones, including a report by J. Trundle (1614) of a Strange and Monstrous Serpent or Dragon lately discovered and yet living in Sussex. This dragon was said to be 9 feet (almost 3 m) long, and poor woodcuts of its limb bones were given.

In France, it is probably not coincidental that there is a concentration of dinosaur legends in Provence, where dinosaur eggs are abundant. One dragon at Aix is reputed to have been burst asunder by St. Margaret; another at Tarascon was first vanquished by Hercules, then (in a remarkable show of ecumenical spirit) by St. Martha. At Draguignan, the mayor has the right to have any of his godchildren christened Drac (Huxley 1979).

Further south, in Portugal, dinosaur tracks at Cabo Espichel are plainly visible (though not readily accessible) in the cliffs. Perched on the cliff edge is a small chapel, Capela da Memoria (memory chapel), which celebrates the legend of Nossa Senhora da Pedra da Mua (our lady of the mule tracks), commemorating the arrival of the Virgin at this location to evangelize Portugal. Inside the building, an eighteenth-century mural of painted tiles shows the event, with the Virgin riding a mule on the cliff top, escorted by angels and welcomed by residents. In the mural, the mule’s tracks ascending the cliff are clearly shown, inadvertently providing the first illustration that certainly figures dinosaur tracks (Sanz 2000, 269, 2003, 18–19; Santos and Rodrigues 2008).

Archaeological and Ethnographic Data from the New World

Adrienne Mayor’s Fossil Legends of the First Americans (2005) has shown unequivocally that Native Americans observed, collected, and attempted to explain the remains of extinct . . . vertebrate species long before contact with Europeans (297). Cuvier’s documentation of early records of fossils included North American native discoveries, which helped to confirm his theory of worldwide extinctions. But earlier theorizers were at work, as surveys of myth in relation to fossils still apparent show native awareness of many earth science concepts. Douglas Wolfe (leader of the Zuni Basin Paleontology Project) is quoted as saying, It’s all there in one elegant myth, evolution, extinction, climate change, deep time, geology and fossils (Mayor 2005, 116).

A number of dinosaur track sites are marked by pictographs or petroglyphs of generally unknown age and significance. In Paraiba, Brazil, footprints of carnivorous dinosaurs exposed on a bedding-plane surface of Lower Cretaceous sandstone are incorporated into a design involving other symbols of unknown significance, carved beside the footprints into the rock surface (Sarjeant 1997; G. Leonardi in Ligabue 1984). Lockley (1991, 185) cites two similar instances in Utah and also notices use of dinosaur track images on snake priest’s aprons worn by Hopi dancers in an area where tracks are well known. Mayor records that the dancers . . . weave these designs into their costumes because large, three-toed fossil tracks impressed in rocks were believed to have been made by the Kachina spirit who sends the rain (2005, 142) (Fig. 1.2). A pictograph appearing to represent a tridactyl footprint appears close to Eubrontes tracks at Flag Point track site in Utah, and has been dated to between ad 1000 and 1200 (Mayor and Sarjeant 2001, 151). Mayor also documents track sites in Arizona known to the Navajos as The Place with Bird Tracks (2005, 139) and Big Lizard Tracks (2007, 256). A geological feature is explained by the Lakota tradition of the Big Racetrack in South Dakota, when in the first sunrise of time, all the strange creatures were summoned for a great race during which the animals became buried (Mayor 2007, 258).

1.2. Zuni Kachina figure wearing costume with dinosaur track designs, ca. 1905.

Photo by Adrienne Mayor.

Mayor shows that Montana natives had collected dinosaur bones for use in hearths (2005, 273), and that Hopi and Pueblo potters sought out gastroliths to burnish pottery (157). Other kinds of fossils have been sought for building and tool making, or collected for their ornamental or magical significance.

Near-scientific interpretations have been made of dinosaur bones by aboriginal peoples. Jean-Baptiste L’Heureux, a French Canadian who lived during the early nineteenth century among the Peigan people of Alberta, Canada, recorded that bones shown to him in what is now Dinosaur Provincial Park were revered as those of the grandfather of the buffalo (Spalding 1999, 22) – a near-scientific interpretation, since the buffalo was the largest animal known to the First Nations of the Plains. Mayor (2005) has shown that the grandfather was a widespread interpretation of fossil remains among North American First Nations, being also applied for instance to bison in the Ohio Valley, and possibly elephantids from Louisiana. In nearby British Columbia, other dinosaur track sites have led to the naming by the Gitksan of a mountain called the Giant Marmot, one of whose ridges is named Where You Find the Tracks of the Giant Marmot (Mayor 2007, 259)

Modern residents of Brazil have interpreted dinosaur tracks as the footprints of saints (Mayor and Sarjeant 2001).

Out of Africa . . . and Australia

In Algeria, the first dinosaur tracks found in Africa were described by paleontologists Le Mesle and Péron in 1880 after being brought to their attention by a French officer (Buffetaut 1987, 180–181). Local Arabs thought they had been made by a giant bird, which Mayor and Sarjeant (2001) speculate may have been related to the Rukh (Roc) of the Arabian Nights (itself based on Aepyornis eggs from Madagascar). The scientists came to a similar conclusion and considered the tracks to be made by birds.

In Cameroon, local residents see dinosaur tracks from a different cultural perspective. Louis Jacobs (1993, 261) describes a site found in 1988 that was well known to local Muslim inhabitants: Living in the bush as they do . . . they could certainly recognize spoor . . . even if they did not know what creatures had made the trails. Some of the more devout and imaginative among them claimed that they had seen, in amongst the tracks the knee, elbow and forehead prints of one of the genuflecting Islamic faithful praying to Mecca.

Another striking example is that reported from the Bushmen of southwestern Africa, who were quite familiar with dinosaur tracks. Paul Ellenberger, a French paleontologist fluent in their language, not only heard songs and tales about the footprints and their makers, but also found that both were depicted in their paintings. Indeed, he reported (Mossman 1990) that the paintings of those unknown track makers were strikingly like iguanodonts, even to having forefeet of the right proportions.

The Bardi people of northwest Australia regarded dinosaur tracks as the trail of a legendary giant emu-man, who (as the track distribution and alignment suggests) walked into the ocean and then returned. Where he sat down, his feathers stuck in the mud, as was perhaps suggested by fossil ferns found in the area. A Tjapwurong tradition in western Victoria tells of giant birds resembling the Tertiary Dromornithids, whose contemporaneity with early humans is suggested by carved footprints and cave paintings in other parts of Australia (Mayor and Sarjeant 2001).

Noah’s Raven – From Folklore to Science

A slab bearing five footprints of a dinosaur in Triassic red sandstones of the Connecticut Valley was plowed up about 1802 by a Massachusetts farm boy, Pliny Moody, who described them as three-toed like a bird’s and installed the slab as a doorstep. (The specimen is figured by Steinbock 1989, 28.) Moody’s tracks were first reported in a local newspaper about 1804 and were solemnly considered to be those of the raven that, when sent out by Noah from the ark to seek land, perversely failed to return. Dr. James Deane (1801–1858) also reported a discovery in 1835 of tracks from a quarry near Greenfield, Massachusetts, which were first described as turkey tracks made 3000 years ago (Thulborn 1990, 38). Deane brought all of these to Reverend Edward Hitchcock’s attention. Hitchcock (1793–1864) acquired the Noah’s Raven tracks in about 1839, and 2 years later, he named the tridactyl tracks Ornithoidichnites fulicoides (38), roughly translatable as the coot-like stony bird track.

Hitchcock has been much criticized because he interpreted these tracks as those of birds. However, as one of us has pointed out elsewhere (Spalding 1993, 84), the moa discoveries in New Zealand had brought knowledge of giant birds to America by this time, and in the absence of knowledge of large bipedal reptiles, Hitchcock’s interpretation – of three-toed tracks at any rate – was a scientific one.

Fossils as Remains of Life

In Europe, again and again, fossils had been recognized as the remains of once-living creatures – in ancient Greece, for instance, by Xenophanes of Colophon and Xanthos of Sardis (Adams 1938, 11–12; Mayor 2000, 210); in the fifteenth century by Leonardo da Vinci; and in the sixteenth century by the Dane Niels Stensen, called Steno. But the ideas of these intellectual pioneers either remained secret (as were Leonardo’s until his codified notes were first read four centuries later) or were rejected in favor of explanations that now seem as fantastic as any folkloric interpretations. Steno’s views were opposed by Martin Lister of London’s Royal Society, who in 1671 (p. 2282) stated categorically that fossils were never any part of an animal. The Welsh naturalist Edward Lhuyd temporized (1699), believing them to be a product of minute spawn of animal life, carried inland by vapors arising from the ocean and growing within the rocks. Even Robert Hooke’s careful demonstration of the organic nature of fossils, presented to the Royal Society of London sometime after 1668 but only published posthumously (1705), did not convince all his contemporaries. Thus Robert Plot (Fig. 1.3), curator of Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum, concluded instead (1705) that the fossil shells of invertebrates in rocks were merely Lapides sui generis, stones formed into an Animal Mould by some extraordinary plastic virtues latent in the Earth to serve as ornaments for the Earth’s secret places, in the fashion that flowers adorned its surface.

Illustrations and Explanations

By the late seventeenth century, some of the basic methods of vertebrate paleontology had developed in Europe as individuals began to search for, extract, and collect specimens, which were increasingly preserved with documentation in organized collections for ongoing study. Scientific illustrations and descriptions of important specimens began to be published. While the debate about the organic origin of invertebrate fossils continued, the nature and anatomical position of fossil bones became increasingly recognized. Some attempts at identification and explanation approached our present understanding, while others continued to be less scientific.

When Plot (1677, 11) discovered and illustrated a dinosaur bone, he recognized it correctly as being a real Bone, now petrified – more specifically, the lowermost part of the Thigh-Bone. From its great size – In Compass near the capita Femoris, just two foot [0.6 m], and at the top above the Sinus . . . about 15 inches [0.45 m] – he concluded that it must have belonged to some greater animal than either an Ox or Horse; and if so in all probability it must have been the Bone of some Elephant, brought hither during the Government of the Romans in Britain (12). Plot’s bone came from the Middle Jurassic strata of Cornwell, near Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire. The bone is now lost, but in 1871 John Phillips identified it from the illustration as the distal end of a femur of a large megalosaur or small cetiosaur (Buffetaut 1987). It is now regarded as part of the femur of a Megalosaurus.

1.3. Robert Plot (1640–1696), the first illustrator of a dinosaur bone.

The bone was reillustrated by Richard Brookes in 1763, just after the starting point of zoological nomenclature with publication of Carl von Linné’s Systema Naturae (1758). The illustration was captioned Scrotum humanum. From comparison with the labeling of Brookes’s other illustrations, it is evident that this was merely a descriptive appellation; he knew quite well that Plot’s specimen was part of a bone. However, the name was taken very seriously by a French philosopher, Jean-Baptiste Robinet, who held the eccentric concept that fossils were attempts by Nature to reproduce in other fashions the organs of humankind. Robinet (1768) not only accepted that Plot’s specimen was a scrotum, but also believed it showed the musculature of the testicles and the vestiges of a urethra (Buffetaut 1979). Though Robinet’s concept was not taken seriously by other savants, it has been (somewhat mischievously) suggested that in view of its binomial format and date, Scrotum humanum was the earliest scientific name for a dinosaur (Halstead 1970; Delair and Sarjeant 1975). However, that proposition has now been firmly rejected by the cognoscenti of zoological taxonomy (Halstead and Sarjeant 1993).

Plot was succeeded at the Ashmolean Museum by Welsh naturalist Edward Lhuyd (1660–1709), who illustrated several fossil teeth in his Lithophylacii Britannici Ichnographia (1699), which were reproduced by R. T. Gunther (1945, 140–142). Though considered by the author to be the remains of fish, two of these seem to be dinosaur teeth. Specimen 1328 closely resembles those of Megalosaurus described by Buckland and comes from the same location of Stonesfield, then variously spelled (Barrington 1773, 172). Specimen 1352 named Rutellum implicatum is surely the tooth of a cetiosaur, and it is thus the earliest record of any sauropod. It came from Caswell, now Carswell, about 5 miles (8 km) southwest of Whitney, where Thames gravels overlie Coral Rag. Unfortunately, the specimens were not among those presented to the university in 1708 and are lost.

Eighteenth-century Discoveries in the United Kingdom

The eighteenth century saw other documented discoveries in England of bones now known to be dinosaurian. John Woodward (1665–1728), professor at Gresham College, London, actively sought fossils, corresponding internationally, sending out collectors, and publishing a guide to collection methods (Levine 1977). At an unknown date he acquired a specimen of dinosaur limb bone from Stonesfield. If complete, the bone would have closely resembled a limb bone of a carnosaur, perhaps Megalosaurus. The specimen appears as number A1 in the posthumously published catalog (Woodward 1728) of his fossil collection and is still preserved in the Woodward collection of the Sedgwick Museum, University of Cambridge. It thus represents the earliest discovered dinosaur bone still known to survive in a collection. However, Woodward’s theoretical works on geology ascribe large vertebrates to the Universal Deluge.

The next recorded find was also made in Oxfordshire. Joshua Platt (1669–1763), an English dealer in curiosities, found three large vertebrae, surely of dinosaurs, at Stonesfield. In 1754 he unwisely he sent them to Peter Collinson, a Quaker merchant and botanist, for examination; Collinson did nothing with them, and their fate is uncertain. Around 1757 Platt found an enormous thighbone at Stonesfield, again probably of Megalosaurus. Though incomplete, it measured 2 feet 5 inches (approximately 81 cm) in length, its width across the condyle being 8 inches (22.4 cm) and across the shaft, 4 inches (11.2 cm). Platt reported this second discovery in a short note (1758) accompanied by a careful drawing by J. Mynde. The bone was listed in an unpublished catalog of Platt’s collection (1773) but has since been lost (Delair and Sarjeant 2002, 188). What is surely the same bone was mentioned in a survey of Oxford’s fossils published in 1757 by A.B., which seems to have been a pen name used by David Steuart Erskine (1742–1829), later the 11th earl of Buchan. He adds the information that it was found three months since, which would be in December 1756 or early January 1757. A.B. indicates he formerly met with two pieces of bone, and some vertebrae of the same kind (1757, 122). It seems possible that the other bone passed into the collection of Smart Lethuieullier (1701–1760), whose manuscript catalog figures specimen 26, a broken rib said to come from Stunfield in Oxfordshire. The collection, including the bone, has been lost. A.B. was also aware of large bones of several kinds found in a pit by William Frankcombe (1734–1767) in the Kimmeridge Clay (Late Jurassic) at Shotover before 1754, since lost.

Part of a scapula, almost certainly of Megalosaurus, again from Stones-field, was presented by a Dr. Watson to what was then the Woodwardian Museum of Cambridge University in 1784; though it survives (specimen D.11.35c), it has never been described or illustrated.

Apart from Plot’s bone, all these fossils came from Stonesfield. Lhuyd’s recurved tooth and the Cambridge scapula can be assigned with reasonable confidence to Megalosaurus, and Woodward’s limb bone fragment and Platt’s thigh bone may also belong to the same genus. In the absence of a specimen or figure, the vertebrae cannot be assigned. While the size caused remark, the earliest recognition of their reptilian significance seems to come from the German geologist Abraham Gottlob Werner (1749–1817) when he alluded to them as a ?saurian present in the compact limestone near Blenheim, Woodstock (1774, 141). Stonesfield is close to Blenheim, and the Stonesfield Slate mined there may readily be regarded as a compact limestone. This recognition is perhaps the source of a similar reference by Thomas Maurice (1820, 1: 470), and John Whitehurst suggested the material was crocodilian (1786, 29).

Eighteenth-century Finds in France

Across the English Channel, the Normandy coast may also have yielded dinosaur bones during the eighteenth century. Bones collected from the Vaches Noires cliffs by the Abbé Dicquemare (1733–1789) and reported in 1776 may have included vertebrae and a femur of a dinosaur (Taquet 1984; Buffetaut et al. 1993); however, the descriptions were brief and unaccompanied by illustrations. Vertebrae collected by the Abbé Bachelet of Rouen from the vicinity of Honfleur, illustrated by Georges Cuvier (1808), were certainly those of a theropod dinosaur (Lennier 1887) but were misinterpreted as having belonged to crocodiles of an unusual type.

Early Nineteenth-century Discoveries in the United Kingdom

Inadequately documented finds continue into the nineteenth century. William Smith obtained from Cuckfield in Sussex in 1809 several bones of gigantic dimensions, which, with the rest of his collection, were transferred in 1815 to the British Museum (Phillips 1844, 63). One of these, an Iguanodon tibia, is illustrated by Charig (1983, 50). Mantell does not mention in his journal visiting Cuckfield until July 6, 1819 (Curwen 1940, 8), nor did he apparently meet Smith until 1833 (Dean 1999, 126). Clearly, then, Smith anticipated Mantell’s discovery of Iguanodon bones, and informal information of Smith’s discovery may have drawn Mantell’s attention to the site.

Also in 1809, an elongate caudal centrum was found at Dorchester-on-Thames, Oxfordshire. It was acquired for the Woodwardian collections of the University of Cambridge, and in Seeley’s 1869 catalog it is regarded as cetiosaurian and probably from the Oolite (Middle Jurassic). It survives in the Sedgwick Museum collection (no. J230 05) and was first figured in 1975 (Delair and Sarjeant 1975, 11 and fig. 3).

Before 1816, the Cretaceous strata of the Isle of Wight yielded bones – surely of dinosaurs – to the geologist Thomas Webster (1773–1844). These were mentioned in a general work on the island (Englefield 1816), and Webster later referred to them as large saurian bones (1824, 1829). Iguanodon bones are now found in the Wealden beds at that locality, so the early finds may represent discoveries of that dinosaur ahead of Mantell, though that cannot be confirmed because the specimens are lost.

Eighteenth-and Early Nineteenth-century Discoveries in the United States

The earliest documented dinosaur bones discovered in North America likewise merit only brief attention in this history. In 1787 a large thighbone – perhaps a hadrosaur limb – was found near Woodbury Creek, Gloucester County, New Jersey, in what are now known to be Late Cretaceous strata. It was reported to the American Philosophical Society on October 5 by Dr. Caspar Wistar (1761–1818) and Timothy Matlack and was thought to be lost, but may now have been located by Donald Baird in the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia (Weishampel and Young 1996, 58).

The second observation must have been that by William Clark. In the course of his exploratory expedition through the recently acquired Louisiana Purchase with Meriwether Lewis in 1806, Clark noted a large rib bone in a cliff on the south bank of the Yellowstone River, about 6 or 7 miles (9–11 km) below Pompey’s Tower (now Pompey’s Pillar) close to what would be the site of Billings, Montana. In his journal, Clark noted it as being 3 feet (0.9 m) in length, tho’ a part of the end appears to have been broken off and about 3 inches (7.6 cm) in circumference. He obtained several pieces of this rib: the bone is neither decayed nor petrified but very rotten and thought it to be a bone of an immense fish (Clark, quoted in Simpson 1942, 171–172). This find was in the Late Cretaceous Hell Creek Formation and was surely a dinosaur bone. Breithaupt (1999, 60) says that the specimen and associated records are not locatable but considers the fossil was most likely a poorly mineralized, Late Cretaceous dinosaur rib from the Hell Creek Formation.

Fossil bones discovered by Solomon Ellsworth Jr. during blasting for a well near East Windsor into the red sandstones of the Connecticut Valley, in contrast, were small enough to be misinterpreted as human bones (Smith 1820). These are in the Yale Peabody Museum (YPM 2125). Almost a century passed before Richard S. Lull (1915) recognized their dinosaurian character, considering them to be bones (parts of the forelimb and foot, the hind limb, and the tail of a small saurischian dinosaur) of a small coelurosaur. A more recent reexamination by Peter M. Galton (1976) indicates instead that they are bones of a prosauropod, Anchisaurus colurus (Weishampel and Young 1996, 58).

In the century or so succeeding Plot’s discovery, then, dinosaur bones had been repeatedly found both in Europe and North America, and had almost as often been misinterpreted. It was a further find from Stonesfield, Oxfordshire, that properly launched at last the scientific study of dinosaurs.

William Buckland and Megalosaurus

It is not certain whether the Reverend William Buckland (1784–1856) (Fig. 1.4), reader of mineralogy at the University of Oxford, personally discovered dinosaur specimens at Stonesfield because he did not record the sources of his material. John Phillips (1800–1874) claimed later that some of them were discovered before his [Buckland’s] day (1871, 196). In 1815 physician and geologist John Kidd (1775–1851) reported that there were the remains of one or more quadrupeds at Stonesfield. The stone was mined for roofing, and workers descended shafts more than 40 feet (12 m) deep (Cadbury 2001, 64). It seems likely that quarrymen, other collectors, and perhaps Buckland himself discovered the material that was eventually described, but that Buckland’s primary role was to describe specimens he had acquired from various sources.

1.4. William Buckland (1784–1856), the first scientist to describe and name a dinosaur.

His material comprised several huge teeth, recurved and with serrated edges, and a partial lower jaw with a tooth; these were early recognized to be reptilian and compared with the similar, albeit much smaller, teeth of the living monitor lizard. Cuvier saw these specimens while visiting Oxford in 1818 and later reported (1824) that they had been found several years before his visit. In a letter to Buckland written from Cuvier’s laboratory in 1821, the Irish naturalist Joseph B. Pentland was already enquiring plaintively: Will you send your Stonesfield reptile or will you publish it yourself? (Sarjeant and Delair 1980, 262).

However, Buckland was a man of diverse concerns that ranged beyond his clerical duties and geological interests; he was a veritable polymath. With so much else to do, his progress toward publishing his discovery was not rapid. It has been suggested (Cadbury 2001, 67) that this was because Buckland was reluctant to publish material that would not help reconcile geology with the Bible. However, as McGowan (2001, 77) points out, Genesis states, There were giants in the Earth. Buckland’s delays could reasonably have been caused by more practical considerations directly related to Megalosaurus. Buckland seems to have been trying to gather more material, for his eventual presentation to the Geological Society was in the hope that such persons as possess other parts of this extraordinary reptile may also transmit to the society . . . further information (quoted in Cadbury 2001, 108). Buckland was also anticipating the cooperation of his clerical and geological colleague, the Reverend William Daniel Conybeare (1787–1857). In a letter written to Pentland on July 11, 1822, Buckland stated that Conybeare

is about to take up immediately the Stonesfield Monitor & to publish a joint paper with me on that Animal, but we have not yet determined through which Channel to give it publication. My great object will be that it will be in time for Cuvier’s Book. Tell me what time that will be.

As early as 1821 Conybeare had given passing mention to the Huge Lizard of Stonesfield (incidentally in an account of a fossil marine reptile), but their joint project did not come to fruition. Yet Buckland’s discovery was already becoming quite well known.

In a general paleontological text published in 1822, James Parkinson illustrated one of the teeth and wrote:

Megalosaurus (Megalos great, saurus a lizard). An animal apparently approaching the Monitor in its mode of dentition, and not yet described. It is found in the calcareous slate of Stonesfield. . . . Drawings have been made of the most essential parts of the animal, now in the [Ashmolean] Museum of Oxford; and it is hoped a description may shortly be given to the public. The animal must in some instances, have attained a length of 40 feet [12 m], and stood eight feet [2.4 m] high.

On the strength of this mention, Parkinson has sometimes been credited with the authorship of the name Megalosaurus. However, this was a period before the rules of taxonomy had been properly formulated, let alone rigorously applied, and such preliminary sharing of information was not yet considered improper.

Another unpublished letter, this time from Buckland to Cuvier himself and written on July 9, 1823, makes it quite clear that Buckland was close to publishing his researches on the Stonesfield Monitor:

My Dear Baron, Herewith I send you Proof Plates of the great Animal of Stonesfield, to which I mean to give the name of Megalosaurus & which I shall publish either in 2nd part of V. [volume] 5 or the 1t [first] part of V. 6 of the Geological Transactions.

Cuvier was indeed becoming impatient. Pentland, again acting as his amanuensis, wrote to Buckland on February 28, 1824:

Our friend Cuvier has this moment requested me to write to you on the subject of the paper which you proposed publishing on the Stonesfield reptile the Megalosaurus. He is now at that part of his work where he intends speaking of your reptile, and wishes to know if your paper has been yet published – and in what form? And in what work? (Sarjeant and Delair 1980, 304)

However, before this letter was sent, Buckland had at last read his paper to the Geological Society at its London headquarters on February 20, 1824. Its publication later that year constituted the earliest scientific description of a dinosaur – though, of course, that name for those reptiles had not yet been formulated.

With the hindsight of much greater knowledge and better specimens, modern paleontologists are well aware of the distinctions between Megalosaurus and Iguanodon. But both Buckland and Mantell were less sure. It seems possible that Buckland’s appeal for other parts of this extraordinary reptile may have been directed (at least in part) at Mantell, for there is documentation to show that both of them thought that at least some of Mantell’s bones belonged to Megalosaurus. By 1822 Mantell had teeth of carnivorous reptiles from Sussex (Cadbury 2001, 87), and in 1823 Cuvier and Buckland both regarded Mantell’s Iguanodon teeth as belonging to a rhinoceros (99). This surely suggested to Buckland that Mantell’s big bones were therefore from the same animal as those from Stonesfield, for no other large land mammals from the period were known, nor were there clear ideas of the stratigraphical distribution to be expected.

Mantell’s journal (as published by Curwen 1940, 51) does not give an account of Buckland’s presentation of Megalosaurus, which Mantell attended. But he does report on March 6, 1824, that Professor Buckland came express from Oxford, with my friend Mr. Lyell to inspect my Tilgate fossils. I had met the Professor at a meeting of the Geological Society, about three weeks since, and shewn him some specimens of bones and vertebrae of the Megalosaurus from Tilgate Forest. Buckland clearly wanted to include this information in his paper, for only 6 days later, on March 12, as Buckland was completing his paper for publication, Mr. Warburton of the Geological Society wrote to him: "Whatever you have to say on the subject of the Stonesfield animal [i.e., Megalosaurus] found at Cuckfield, Sussex [Mantell’s site], must be forwarded at once (quoted in Cadbury 2001, 110). In the published version, Buckland generously acknowledged Mantell’s discoveries, and he referred to the large size of a thigh bone of another of the same species which has been discovered in the ferruginous sandstone of Tilgate Forest." (quoted in Cadbury 2001, 111). It was only with Cuvier’s acknowledgement that the Iguanodon teeth could belong to a reptilian herbivore, and Mantell’s publication of Iguanodon, that the distinction between the two giant reptiles became clear.

Apart from Mantell’s carnivore material (which is from a later period and presumably represents a different genus), all the carnivore material known to Buckland came from the underground excavations at Stonesfield. Owen (1842, 103) suggests the possibility that this material represents a single individual, though today carnivore bone beds are also known.

Gideon Mantell and Iguanodon

Sussex surgeon Gideon Algernon Mantell (Fig. 1.5) also played an important role in the discovery of the dinosaurs, but it has been widely misrepresented. An oft-repeated story (e.g., in Colbert 1983, 13–15) tells how, while her husband was visiting a patient early in 1822, his wife, Mary Ann, found some fossil teeth in a pile of road metal (stone rubble used for road making); that, excited by her find, Gideon ascertained from which quarry the road metal had come, finding more teeth and bones there; and that these events marked the beginning not merely of his concern with Iguanodon, but also of the scientific study of dinosaurs, with Buckland only spurred into publishing results amassed later by the fear that Mantell might anticipate him.

Unfortunately, as Dean (1993, 208–211) demonstrates, this romantic story does not withstand scrutiny. In his book on The Fossils of the South Downs, published in May 1822, Mantell makes mention that teeth, vertebrae, bones and other remains of an animal of the lizard tribe, of enormous magnitude [have been] discovered in the county of Sussex. Dean points out also that though Mary Ann may indeed have found Iguanodon teeth for him, Gideon subsequently named himself as their discoverer.

Even with such problems and uncertainties set aside, the story of Mantell’s recognition of Iguanodon remains a complex and fascinating one. Upon displaying some of his finds at the Geological Society on June 21, 1821, Mantell aroused little interest. When Charles Lyell took one of the teeth to Paris for Cuvier (Fig. 1.6) to examine, it was dismissed as being the upper incisor of a rhinoceros, while some metatarsals were considered to belong to a species of hippopotamus (Mantell 1850, 195). The actual tooth is now in the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa (Yaldwyn et al. 1997). It bears two inscriptions. The first, in Mantell’s writing, notes, This was the first tooth of the Iguanodon sent to Baron Cuvier, who pronounced it to be the Incisor of Rhinoceros. However, on the other side, in what is apparently Lyell’s hand, the label states, This however was at an evening party. The next morning he told me that he was satisfied it was something quite different. Sir C.L. 4 Feb 59. It is not clear when (or even if) Lyell told Mantell of Cuvier’s change of mind – the date of the note is after Mantell’s death. However, Mantell sent drawings of more teeth in June 1824, and Cuvier replied that though the teeth were not carnivorous, he thought them reptilian (Cadbury 2001, 116).

1.5. Gideon Algernon Mantell (1790–1852), the first scientist to describe and name a herbivorous dinosaur.

This seems to have confirmed Mantell’s suspicions, and in September 1824 the crucial breakthrough came when he was examining bones and teeth in the Hunterian Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons in London. Another visitor on that day, Samuel Stutchbury, drew Mantell’s attention to the dentition of the living iguana. Why, the Sussex teeth were merely gigantic equivalents of the iguana’s teeth!

When Mantell wrote again to Cuvier, the great French scientist (who, as we have seen, had already abandoned his initial reaction) was convinced by the new interpretation, writing: N’aurons nous pas ici un animal nouveau, un reptile herbivore? [Have we not here a new animal, a herbivorous reptile?] (quoted by Mantell 1851, 231–232).

Mantell seems originally to have proposed calling his new reptile Iguanosaurus (Anonymous 1824), but this name was dropped in favor of the more euphonious Iguanodon, proposed to him by Conybeare. On February 10, 1825, almost a year after Buckland’s paper, Mantell proudly reported his discovery to the Royal Society of London, and his account was published in its Philosophical Transactions later that year.

Megalosaurus had been interesting, but after all, gigantic reptilian carnivores were already well known; were there not living crocodiles in British India, called muggers, that attained lengths of over 30 feet (9 m)? A giant reptilian herbivore, though – why, that was indeed a wholly novel concept!

Buckland’s Other Dinosaur Discoveries

If Buckland had been less preoccupied with other matters, he might have anticipated Mantell in the description of Iguanodon. Adam Sedgwick (1822) noted that Buckland had discovered cetacean bones at Sandown Bay, Isle of Wight, before Christmas 1822; as Buckland himself later reported (1824, 392, 1829), these were in fact bones of Iguanodon. He had also already obtained for the Oxford museum a bone of even more gigantic size, found in fragments by the geologist Hugh Strickland (1811–1853) in a railway cutting near Enslow Bridge, Oxfordshire. Carefully pieced together by Buckland, these proved to constitute a femur 4 feet 3 inches (1.3 m) long (Strickland 1848). After being carefully cemented and bound round with wire, this bone was long the object of admiration in the Oxford classroom for geology (Phillips 1871, 247). Buckland also acquired or examined other bones of comparable character – among them, vertebrae from Middle Jurassic localities near Chipping Campden and near Thame, Oxfordshire, plus a blade bone of enormous size from the latter place, while a whole batch of fossil bones were obtained for him by William Stowe from near Buckingham. All of these, as Buckland wrote in a letter to Stowe (quoted in Phillips 1871, 245), belonged to some yet undescribed reptile of enormous size, larger than the Iguanodon, and of which I am collecting scattered fragments into our museum, in hope ere long of being able to make of its history.

1.6. Jean Léopold Nicolas Frédéric (called Georges), Baron Cuvier (1769–1832), the greatest anatomist of the early nineteenth century.

Yet Buckland never did write further on these gigantic bones. That task was left to Richard Owen, who described and named Cetiosaurus – the earliest sauropod dinosaur to be discovered – in an address to the Geological Society of London on June 30, 1841. This served as prelude to Owen’s major account of British fossil reptiles, given to the British Association in August 1841, and published the following year. Hugh Torrens (1995) has shown that the name Dinosauria was not applied until the published version.

Further Finds in England

In the meantime, other dinosaur bones were being discovered. Saurian bones from strata exposed at Swanwich (now Swanage) Bay, Dorset, were given passing mention by the geologist William H. Fitton (1824). Vertebrae and an imperfect femur were dug up at Headford Wood Common, Sussex, in 1824 (Murchison 1826). All three discoveries were made in Wealden (Lower Cretaceous) strata. Probably all three were Iguanodon bones, but the specimens (if they survive) have not been identified and studied.

While Buckland was being again distracted, Mantell pursued his dinosaurs. He was accumulating further bones of Iguanodon, from the Wealden, including bone fragments from the cliffs about Sandown, Isle of Wight, and most notably, a slab from Maidstone, Kent. This displayed a partial skeleton (Fig. 1.7), a discovery so important that it has been facetiously styled his mantel-piece (Spalding 1993, 23); it allowed him to attempt a reconstruction, upon which the early restorations of that creature were to be based. Mantell also discovered the remains of an armored dinosaur – postcranial bones associated with dermal elements and armor plate – which he named Hylaeosaurus; this was the first ankylosaur to be described (1833). Before his death in 1852, he was to describe and name two further dinosaur genera.

Samuel Stutchbury reentered the story when, in association with S. H. Riley, he reported the earliest reptilian remains from the English Triassic – specifically, from the so-called Magnesian Conglomerate of the Bristol district (Riley and Stutchbury 1836, 1840). Three genera were recognized, two of which (Thecodontosaurus and Palaeosaurus) are accepted nowadays as dinosaurs; the former is now considered a prosauropod, while the latter is of dubious affinity.

1.7. Gideon Mantell’s Mantel-piece: the first substantial associated dinosaur skeleton discovered.

Discoveries Elsewhere in Europe

The first recognition of dinosaurs in France came in 1828, when A. de Caumont (1828) reported Megalosaurus bones from the Middle Jurassic oolite of Caen, Normandy. In the ensuing years, the paleontologist Jacques-Amand Eudes-Deslongchamps (1794–1867) painstakingly assembled bones and bone fragments from the quarries and construction sites around Caen. When he became confident that he had enough material, he published a description of the partial skeleton thus reconstituted. In tribute to the discoverer of Megalosaurus, he named it Poekilopleuron bucklandi (1838). Eudes-Deslongchamps thought the animal to have been largely marine, though well able to rest on the shore and bask in the sun (Buffetaut et al. 1993, 162). This was the last of the misapprehensions about dinosaurs to precede Owen’s establishment of the Dinosauria – though, in justice, one must note that there have been many since!

The first finds in Germany were in Triassic red sandstones and followed close on the discoveries near Bristol. In 1837 Christian Erich Hermann von Meyer (1801–1869) described and named Plateosaurus, which was destined long to remain the most fully known of the dinosaurs we now call prosauropods. (More than 100 skeletons have been found in southern Germany and Switzerland.) A tooth recovered from the Jurassic strata of southern Russia by A. Zborzewski was rather unnecessarily given its own generic name, Macrodontophion (1834); it was probably that of a carnosaur.

Summary

Where conditions are suitable, bones, tracks, and even eggshells seem to have attracted attention from early times. For some ancient discoveries, no explanation has come down to us; other early explanations conceal a germ of truth in legend, while near-scientific explanations come from several cultures in Africa, Asia, and North America as well as Europe. The first recorded scientific discovery and most other early finds were from the Jurassic strata of England, though there were early observations also in France and North America. During almost 150 years following Robert Plot’s first illustration of a dinosaur bone in 1677, these fossils were often misinterpreted in a variety of fashions – and even when rightly considered as bones, they were attributed to the remains of elephants, crocodiles, and fish. During the eighteenth century, organized collections were being made in England and France that included dinosaur bones and teeth. Marine reptiles were described first, but the earliest recognition of bones of long-extinct land creatures was made by William Buckland, in his study of the carnivorous Megalosaurus (1824). Gideon Mantell’s researches on Iguanodon, first of the herbivorous dinosaurs to be identified, overlapped Buckland’s work and were published only a little later (1825). Though Buckland accumulated sauropod bones also, he did not describe them; this was done eventually by Owen, in his preliminary description of Cetiosaurus (1841). In addition to further discoveries in England, giant reptiles recognized and named before Owen’s creation of the dinosaur (1842) included Plateosaurus von Meyer (1837), from Germany, and Poekilopleuron Eudes-Deslongchamps (1838), from France, plus a single tooth from Russia.

Acknowledgments

The research for the first edition of this chapter was undertaken by William Sarjeant under tenure of the Natural Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada (operating grant 8393) and with the assistance of Linda Dietz. Letters quoted on early French dinosaur finds were courteously furnished by transcription for Catherine Hustache of the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, Paris, and were published with permission.

After the death of William Sarjeant in July 2002, the revision was undertaken by David Spalding, with the help of papers on aspects of the subject already published by Sarjeant and various collaborators, and new data from his own research. Helen Wong, Dr. Sarjeant’s secretary, provided valuable assistance in suggesting and locating research materials and illustrations. Darren Tanke provided data from the 2008 History of Geology Group conference. Suggestions from an anonymous reviewer have been helpful.

References

A.B. [Erskine, D. S.] 1757. Curious discoveries in making new roads. Gentleman’s Magazine 27: 20–21.

Adams, F. D. 1938. The Birth and Development of the Geological Sciences. Baltimore: Williams & Wilkins. Reprint, 1954, New York: Dover Books.

Andersson, J. G. 1934. Children of the Yellow Earth. Reprint, 1973, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

———. 1943. Under a Lucky Star. New York: Viking Press.

Anonymous. 1824. Organic remains. New Monthly Magazine 12 (December): 575

Barrett, P. M., M. T. Carrano, and J. A. Wilson. 2008. The discovery of dinosaurs in the Lameta Beds of Central India. In Moody 2008, 32–33.

Barrington, D. 1773. Some account of a fossil lately found near Christchurch, in Hampshire. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 48: 171–172.

Breithaupt, Brent H. 1999. The first discoveries of dinosaurs in the American West. In D. D. Gillette (ed.), Vertebrate Paleontology in Utah, 59–65. Miscellaneous Publication 99-1. Salt Lake City: Utah Geological Survey.

Brookes, R. 1763. The Natural History of Waters, Earths, Stones, Fossils, and Minerals, with their Virtues, Properties, and Medicinal Uses: To Which is added, The Method in which Linnaeus has treated these Subjects. Vol. 5. London: Newberry. 5th ed., 1772.

Buckland, W. 1824. Notice on the Megalosaurus, or great fossil lizard of Stones-field. Transactions of the Geological Society of London 1 (ser. 2): 390–396. Reprint, Weishampel and White 2003, 51–59.

———. 1829. On the discovery of the bones of the iguanodon, and other large reptiles, in the Isle of Wight and Isle of Purbeck. Proceedings of the Geological Society of London 1: 159–160.

Buffetaut, E. 1979. A propos du reste de dinosaurien le plus anciennement décrit: l’interprétation de J. B. Robinet (1768). Histoire et Nature 14: 79–84.

———. 1987. A Short History of Vertebrate Palaeontology. New York: Methuen.

Buffetaut, E., G. Cuny, and J. Le Loeuff. 1993. The discovery of French dinosaurs. Modern Geology 18: 161–182. Reprint, Sarjeant 1995, 159–180.

Cadbury, D. 2001. The Dinosaur Hunters. London: Fourth Estate.

Carpenter, K., K., F. Hirsch, and J. R. Horner (eds.). 1994. Dinosaur Eggs and Babies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Caumont, A. de. 1828. Essai sur la topographie géognostique du département du Calvados. Caen, France: Chalopin.

Charig, A. 1983. A New Look at the Dinosaurs. New York: Facts on File.

Colbert, E. H. 1983. Dinosaurs: An Illustrated History. Maplewood, N.J.: Hammond.

Conybeare, W. D. 1821. Notice of the discovery of a new fossil animal, forming a link between the ichthyosaurus and crocodile, together with general remarks on the osteology of the ichthyosaurus. Transactions of the Geological Society of London 5 (ser. 1): 559–594.

Curwen, E. C. (ed.). 1940. The Journal of Gideon Mantell, Surgeon and Geologist. London: Oxford University Press.

Cuvier, G. 1808. Sur des ossemens fossiles de crocodiles, et particulièrement sur ceux des environs du Havre et de Honfleur, avec des remarques sur les squelettes des sauriens de la Thuringe. Annales du Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, Paris 12: 73–110.

———. 1824. Recherches sur les ossemens fossiles du quadrupèdes. Rev. ed. 6 vols. Paris: Dulour et d’Ocagne.

Dean, D. R. 1993. Gideon Mantell and the discovery of Iguanodon. Modern Geology 18: 209–219. Reprint, Sarjeant 1995, 207–218.

———. 1999. Gideon Mantell and the Discovery of Dinosaurs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Delair, J. B., and W. A. S. Sarjeant. 1975. The earliest discoveries of dinosaurs. Isis 66: 5–25.

———. 2002. The earliest discoveries of dinosaurs: the records re-examined. Proceedings of the Geologists Association 113: 185–197.

Dong, Z., and A. C. Milner. 1988. Dinosaurs from China. London: British Museum (Natural History) China Ocean Press.

Englefield, H. C. 1816. A description of the principal picturesque beauties, antiquities, and geological phoenomena, of the Isle of Wight . . . With additional observations on the strata of the island, and their continuation in the adjacent parts of Dorsetshire. London: Payne and Foss.

Eudes-Deslongchamps, J. A. 1838. Mémoire sur le Poekilopleuron Bucklandii, grand saurien fossile intermédiaire entre les crocodiles et les lézards. Mémoires de la Société Linnéenne de Normandie (Calvados) 6: 37–146.

Fitton, W. H. 1824. Enquiries respecting the geological relations of the beds between the Chalk and the Purbeck Limestone in the south-east of England. Annals of Philosophy 8: 365–383.

Galton, P. 1976. Prosauropod dinosaurs (Reptilia: Saurischia) of North America. Postilla 169: 4.

Gould, C. 1886. Mythical Monsters. London: W. H. Allen & Co. Reprint, 2002, as Dragons, Unicorns, and Sea Serpents: A Classic Study of the Evidence for their Existence. Dover Publications.

Gunther, R. T. 1945. Early Science in Oxford. Life and Letters of Edward Lhwyd. Vol. 14. Oxford: The Author.

Halstead, L. B. 1970. Scrotum humanum Brookes 1763—the first named dinosaur. Journal of Insignificant Research 5: 14–15.

Halstead, L. B., and W. A. S. Sarjeant. 1993. Scrotum humanum Brookes—the earliest name for a dinosaur? Modern Geology, 18: 221–224. Reprint, Sarjeant 1995, 219–222.

Hooke, R. 1705. The posthumous works of Robert Hooke . . . containing his Cutlerian lectures, and other discourses, read at the meetings of the illustrious Royal Society. London: Waller.

Huxley, F. 1979. The Dragon: Nature of Spirit, Spirit of Nature. London: Thames and Hudson.

Jacobs, L. 1993. Quest for the African Dinosaurs: Ancient Roots of the Modern World. New York: Villard Books.

Jacobs, L. 1995. Lone Star Dinosaurs. College Station: Texas A&M University Press.

Kirchner, H. 1941. Versteinerte Reptilfährten als Grundlage für ein Drachenkampf in einem Heldenlied. Zeitschrift der Deutschen Geologischen Gesellschaft 93: 309.

Lennier, G. 1887. Etudes paléontologiques. Description des fossiles du Cap de la Hève. Bulletin de la Société Géologique de Normandie 12: 17–98.

Levine, J. M. 1977. Dr. Woodward’s Shield: History, Science, and Satire in Augustan England. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.

Lhuyd, E. 1699. Lithophylacii Britannici Ichnographia, sive, lapidum aliorumque fossilium Britannicorum singulari figura insignium; quotquot hactenus vel ipse invenit vel ab amicis accepit distributio classica, scrinii sui lapidarii repertorium cum locis singulorum natalibus exhibens. Additis rariorum aliquot figuris aere incisis; cum epistolis ad clarissimos viros de quibusdam circa marina fossilia & stirpes minerales praesertim notandis. Nusquam magis erramus quam in falsis inductionibus; saepe enim ex aliquot exemplis Universale quiddam colligimus; idque perperam cum ad ea, quae excipi possunt animum non attendimus. London: Lipsiae, Gleditsch & Weidmann.

Ligabue, G. (ed.). 1984. Sulle Orme dei Dinosauri. Esplorazioni e Richerche 9. Rome: Erizzo for Le Società del Gruppo ENI.

Lister, M. 1671. Fossil shells in several places of England. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 6: 2281–2284.

Lockley, M. G. 1991. Tracking Dinosaurs: A New Look at an Ancient World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Lull, R. S. 1915. Triassic life of the Connecticut Valley. Connecticut Geological and Natural History Survey, Bulletin 24: 1–285. 2nd ed., Connecticut Geological and Natural History Survey, Bulletin 81: 1–336. 1953.

Mantell, G. A. 1822. The Fossils of the South Downs; or, Illustrations of the Geology of Sussex. London: Relfe.

———. 1825. Notice on the Iguanodon, a newly discovered fossil reptile, from the sandstone of Tilgate Forest, in Sussex. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 115: 179–186. Reprint, Weishampel and White 2003, 68–71.

———. 1833. The Geology of the South-East of England. London: Longman.

———. 1850. A Pictorial Atlas of Fossil Remains consisting of coloured illustrations selected from Parkinson’s Organic Remains of a Former World and Artis’s Antediluvian Phytology. London: Bohn.

———. 1851. Petrifactions and their teachings; or, A hand-book to the gallery of organic remains of the British Museum. London: Bohn.

Maurice, T. 1820. The History of Hindostan: its arts and its science, as connected with the history of the other great empires of Asia, during the most ancient periods of the world. 2 vols. Bulmer, London.

Mayor, A. 2000. The First