Deposits Mag

15/07/2020 Walk that Changed History: New evidence about the discovery of the Iguanodon – Deposits Mag DEPOSITS MAG Fossils, geology and minerals. The highly acclaimed international earth science magazine with over 450 articles and book reviews. depositsmag.com Walk that Changed History: New evidence about the discovery of the Iguanodon Martin Simpson (UK) ewly unearthed documentary evidence substantiates the classic story that Mary Ann Mantell found some worn down Iguanodon teeth in Cuckêld, Sussex, before 1822 in some rocks by the roadside, while her husband Gideon was elsewhere. She was accompanied by a friend and purchased the specimens from a workman. We now have the who, what, where and why in Nthis discovery, but the precise when remains unclear. It is suggested in this article that the event took place on 21 May 1821 and the fossils were passed to Gideon the following day. Subsequently, the ‘later to be’ dinosaur was formally named in 1825. Introduction One of the beneˆts of the government’s 2020 social lockdown policy, introduced to combat the spread of the Coronavirus pandemic, has been the increase in reading, researching and publishing amongst many scientiˆc academics. There will no doubt be a corresponding increase in productivity for the individual scientists themselves and a forthcoming ‘paper boom’. In my own case, I have spent proportionately more of my time preparing, cataloguing and researching fossils, and less on actual êld collecting due to the travel restrictions, resulting in a signiˆcant catch-up of jobs that needed doing, but were otherwise conˆned to the back burner. In particular, with precious little television worth watching, I have been trawling the internet in search of obscure references to check the synonymies of umpteen species of interest, and to add to their historical background. Whilst googling a topic somewhat off at a tangent from my main êld of interest, and experimenting with endless word-search combinations to pass the time, on 11 May 2020 at 10pm I came across something completely unexpected, previously overlooked and hugely signiˆcant. We have a provincial genealogist to thank for posting an article online about some early nineteenth-century inhabitants of a quintessentially English country village called Cuckêld, in the sleepy and picturesque county of West Sussex. In his blog. Cuckêld Connections, a personal journey of discovery (https://www.cuckêldconnections.org.uk/blog), Mr Andy Revell has shone new light upon a story of immense importance to those interested in the history of palaeontology, in particular the study of dinosaurs. This is because one of the characters referred to is Mary Ann Mantell, wife of the famous surgeon and fossil collector, Gideon Algernon Mantell, a pioneer of Cretaceous palaeontology (Figs. 1 and 2). https://depositsmag.com/?print-my-blog=1&post-type=post&statuses%5B%5D=future&rendering_wait=0&columns=1&font_size=normal&image_… 1/17 15/07/2020 Walk that Changed History: New evidence about the discovery of the Iguanodon – Deposits Mag Fig. 1. (Left) Mary Ann Mantell (1795-1869) and (Right) her husband Gideon Algernon Mantell (1790-1852). https://depositsmag.com/?print-my-blog=1&post-type=post&statuses%5B%5D=future&rendering_wait=0&columns=1&font_size=normal&image_… 2/17 15/07/2020 Walk that Changed History: New evidence about the discovery of the Iguanodon – Deposits Mag Fig. 2a. Mary Ann Mantell, circa 1850s. Oil painting, artist unknown, in the collection of the Alexander Turnbull Library, Auckland, New Zealand. https://depositsmag.com/?print-my-blog=1&post-type=post&statuses%5B%5D=future&rendering_wait=0&columns=1&font_size=normal&image_… 3/17 15/07/2020 Walk that Changed History: New evidence about the discovery of the Iguanodon – Deposits Mag Fig. 2b. Mary Ann Mantell, circa 1860s. Previously unpublished photograph in the collection of the Alexander Turnbull Library, Auckland, New Zealand. (Alexander Turnbull Library, PA10-027_BW_adjusted.tif.) The traditional story There is an often-told story in palaeontology of how, in the early 1820s, the ˆrst fossilised teeth were found of a creature later to be named Iguanodon, a giant terrestrial ‘saurian’ or reptile. This was later still to be included in a select group of creatures, christened the Dinosauria by Richard Owen in 1842. https://depositsmag.com/?print-my-blog=1&post-type=post&statuses%5B%5D=future&rendering_wait=0&columns=1&font_size=normal&image_… 4/17 15/07/2020 Walk that Changed History: New evidence about the discovery of the Iguanodon – Deposits Mag Fig. 3. Typical popular account of the story of the discovery of the Mantells’ Iguanodon teeth, from the Dinosaur! magazine (Anon 1992). The traditional version of this tale, endlessly repeated in dinosaur books, articles and magazines across the world (for example, Fig. 3), is that Mrs Mantell was out walking by the roadside while her husband Gideon was attending a patient in Cuckêld (Fig. 4), and that she happened to come across (in a pile of rubble) some unusual fossilised wedge-shaped teeth (Fig. 6a and b). https://depositsmag.com/?print-my-blog=1&post-type=post&statuses%5B%5D=future&rendering_wait=0&columns=1&font_size=normal&image_… 5/17 15/07/2020 Walk that Changed History: New evidence about the discovery of the Iguanodon – Deposits Mag Fig. 4. Locality map showing the sites around the Mantells’ home town of Lewes in Sussex; Cuckêld, the site of the discovery; and Shefêld Park and Fletching, visited by the Mantells in 1821. Upon seeing these specimens, so the story goes, Gideon realised that the worn down and ostensibly mammal-like teeth belonged instead to a giant herbivorous reptile, a creature new to science which, in February 1825 (Mantell, 1825), he formally named Iguanodon (Fig. 5). https://depositsmag.com/?print-my-blog=1&post-type=post&statuses%5B%5D=future&rendering_wait=0&columns=1&font_size=normal&image_… 6/17 15/07/2020 Walk that Changed History: New evidence about the discovery of the Iguanodon – Deposits Mag Fig. 5. Restoration of Iguanodon, as redrawn by contemporary palaeo- artist Diego Barletta, after the original version of Neave Parker and adjusted for a quadrupedal posture. Despite opposition from sceptical fellow palaeontologists, and with only a few teeth and bones to go on, Mantell (it is traditionally said) stubbornly stood by his vision of a massively scaled up version of an Iguana lizard, whose teeth his new species superˆcially resembled (Fig. 6c). Fig. 6a. Iguanodon tooth. Worn down example in the Te Papa Museum, New Zealand, noted by Gideon as being the ˆrst, donated by the Mantell family in 1930. https://depositsmag.com/?print-my-blog=1&post-type=post&statuses%5B%5D=future&rendering_wait=0&columns=1&font_size=normal&image_… 7/17 15/07/2020 Walk that Changed History: New evidence about the discovery of the Iguanodon – Deposits Mag Fig. 6b. Iguanodon tooth from Cuckêld, another of the ˆrst, wedge- shaped specimens, now in the collection of the Natural History Museum, London. Fig. 6c. Teeth of a modern Iguana lizard, which bear a superˆcial resemblance to the unworn teeth of Iguanodon. He had been aided by the opinion not only of the highly respected anatomist Baron Georges Cuvier of the Natural History Museum in Paris, to whom Gideon had sent the fossils, but also of Samuel Stutchbury of the Hunterian Museum in London, who had fortuitously provided for comparison a modern Iguana specimen from Barbados. The rest, as they say, is history, or in this case palaeontology, and Mantell took his place amongst the greats of Victorian academia, scientists like Richard Owen, William Buckland, Charles Lyell and Roderick Murchison. Countless genera and species have been erected in Mantell’s honour and his name is entrenched in the history of dinosaur research. As others have put it, the “Wizard of the Weald” rode on the back of his “pet” Iguanodon into the “Temple of Immortality” (see Curwen 1940, p.72). However, it is the ˆrst part of this story that deserves more scrutiny here – in particular, just who really did ˆnd these ˆrst teeth and what were the exact circumstances of their discovery? https://depositsmag.com/?print-my-blog=1&post-type=post&statuses%5B%5D=future&rendering_wait=0&columns=1&font_size=normal&image_… 8/17 15/07/2020 Walk that Changed History: New evidence about the discovery of the Iguanodon – Deposits Mag A shift in opinion In recent years, some scholars have cast doubt on the veracity of the original story and the role played by Mary, suggesting that the teeth were found instead by her husband, a local quarry worker or an intermediary. Scepticism was in evidence in the 1980s when Iguanodon specialist David Norman (1985), for example, described the tale as “rather appealing but unsubstantiated”. Mantell’s most notable recent biographer, Dennis Dean, later argued (Dean 1998, 1999) that the story never took place at all and is therefore ˆctitious, despite having been endorsed by such eminent earlier dinosaur historians as Edwin Colbert (1971) and William Stinton (1972), and also the biographer Sydney Spokes (1927, p.18). This view has been followed by many subsequent authors, for example, MacGowan (2002: “a wonderful story without foundation”), Sarjeant (1997: “a charming anecdote … entirely ˆctional … not supported by historical evidence”), and Critchley (2010), who regarded the discovery as entirely Gideon’s. Dean (1998, 1999) described the details of the story as “specious” and attributed them to “poor scholarship”. He preferred a male-oriented version of events dominated by Gideon, in which his hero single-handedly discovered a dozen dinosaurs in a proliˆc career, outwitting the establishment’s elite experts and prevailing over adversity – a victimised character cast as a provincial amateur pitted against the professional anatomists and university dons.

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