There were giants in the earth in those days.
—GENESIS 6:4
GIANTS IN THE EARTH
For centuries, people had picked up huge bones in the ground and puzzled over their origins. In some parts of the world, they were thought to be the remains of legendary dragons, sea monsters, or Cyclopes. On the Greek island of Samos, the numerous large bones were thought to be the remains of Amazon warrior women who had died in battle. (We now know they are the remains of elephants, giraffes, antelopes, cattle, hyenas, and other mammals that were abundantly fossilized there.) The red color of the rocks was thought to be bloodstains (the color actually comes from the rusty iron oxides in the rocks). Some people have argued that the striking fossils of Protoceratops found in the Gobi Desert of Mongolia were the source of the myth of griffins, which had a lion’s head and wings; the frill covering part of the neck reminded the ancients of wings (chapter 24). Large bones of dinosaurs, marine reptiles, and large mammals have been known since prehistoric times, and they have been explained by whatever mythology was prevalent among the peoples who found them.
In Europe, the myths about Earth found in the Bible strongly influenced what people saw in specimens. For example, in 1726 the Swiss scholar Johann Scheuchzer obtained and described a large fossil skeleton of a creature found in Switzerland. His biblical bias was so strong that he thought it was the skeleton of a man who had died in Noah’s flood. He even named it Homo diluvii testis, “man, a witness of the Flood” (figure 1.1). Many years later the famous anatomist and paleontologist Georges Cuvier showed it was not human at all but a giant salamander, which is a close relative of the living giant salamanders found in China and Japan. Today it seems laughable that Scheuchzer could mistake a salamander fossil for a human skeleton, but comparative anatomy was in its infancy in 1726, and everyone was preconditioned to see giant humans as described in the Bible.
Figure 1.1
The giant extinct salamander interpreted as Homo diluvii testis, “Man, a witness of the Flood,” by Johann Scheuchzer in 1726. (Public domain)
Numerous accounts of giant bones are known in the literature before 1800, but most cannot be tracked down or identified because the fossils have been lost and adequate illustrations, measurements, or locality information are not available to determine what they were talking about. One of the first such fossils that might be identifiable was illustrated in Robert Plot’s 1677 book, Natural History of Oxfordshire (figure 1.2). Plot was the first professor of chemistry at the University of Oxford, and later he was curator of the Ashmolean Museum of Oxford, established in 1683. He was interested in all areas of natural history known at the time. His book described the living animals and plants of the Oxfordshire region as well as some of the rock and fossils. Among these was a strange piece of fossil bone that Plot correctly guessed was the end of a thighbone (femur) of a very large creature. This description was unusual for Plot because he did not believe that most fossils were the petrified remains of animals. Instead he imagined that they were formed by crystallization inside rocks.
Figure 1.2
Robert Plot’s fossil of the knee end of a dinosaur thighbone that a later author, Richard Brookes, interpreted as a fossil of giant petrified testicles, “Scrotum humanum.” (Public domain)
The specimen had been found in quarries north of Oxford, from a formation we know now is the Middle Jurassic Taynton Limestone. It was much too large to match any animal currently found in England, so Plot guessed that it came from the skeleton of a war elephant used when the Romans conquered Britannia. Later he thought that it might be from a giant human, as mentioned in the Bible. In his words:
Come we next to such [stones] as concern the…Members of the Body: Amongst which, I have one dug out of a quarry in the Parish of Cornwell, and given me by the ingenious Sir Thomas Pennyston, that has exactly the Figure of the lowermost part of the Thigh-Bone of a Man or at least of some other Animal, with capita Femoris inferiora, between which are the anterior…and the large posterior Sinus…: and a little above the Sinus, where it seems to have been broken off, shewing the marrow within of a shining Spar-like Substance of its true Colour and Figure, in the hollow of the Bone…. In Compass near the capita Femoris, just two Foot, and at the top above the Sinus…about 15 inches: in weight, though representing so short a part of the Thigh-Bone, almost 20 pounds.
The fossil has since been lost, but it is the first adequately illustrated dinosaur fossil known and is almost certainly from the dinosaur discussed in this chapter, Megalosaurus.
This first known dinosaur was almost given a truly inappropriate name. In 1763 Richard Brookes republished Plot’s illustration and called the fossil “Scrotum humanum” in a figure caption. Indeed, to someone who doesn’t know anatomy well and is conditioned to see every large fossil as a relict of biblical giants, it does look a bit like a pair of huge human scrota and the base of a penis. In addition, the form of Brookes’s name suggests the genus and species binomial naming system devised by Carl Linnaeus in 1758 and earlier, not only for animals and plants but also for natural curiosities found in rocks. In 1970, the eccentric British paleontologist Lambert Beverly Halstead (famous for trying to act out dinosaurs mating when giving presentations at scientific meetings) published an article suggesting that the first named dinosaur was properly called “Scrotum humanum.” Later paleontologists asked the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature (the body that makes the rules about scientific names) to formally suppress the name “Scrotum humanum.” The commission ruled that this was unnecessary because the name was only published in a caption, without adequate description or diagnosis, the only specimen was lost, and it was not certain that it was the same as Megalosaurus.
Even though the original fossil was lost, specimens continued to be found in Stonesfield that ended up in the Oxford collections. Most were huge but fragmentary, so it was impossible to identify the animal to which they belonged. However, one lower jawbone with several teeth in various states of eruption found in 1797—bought for Oxford by anatomist and physician Sir Christopher Pegge for the then princely sum of 10 shillings 6 pence—was placed in the anatomy collections of Christ Church College in Oxford where Pegge taught. By 1815, there were quite a few bones, and they caught the attention of the legendary naturalist Sir William Buckland (figure 1.3).
Figure 1.3
Portrait of William Buckland. (Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)
Buckland was one of the most amazing and colorful figures in the history of science. Born in 1784 in Axminster in Devon in southwestern England, he accompanied his father (the local church rector) on fossil-collecting walks on the coastline at Lyme Regis (later famous for the marine reptiles found by Mary Anning) and developed an early interest in natural history. After attending several schools, he ended up studying mineralogy and chemistry at Corpus Christi College in Oxford, where he would spend most of the rest of his life. By 1813, he succeeded his mentor John Kidd as a reader in mineralogy at Oxford, and he soon became famous for his popular and engaging style of lecturing. Buckland was known for his dramatic delivery and gestures during lectures, sometimes acting out the behavior of the animals he was describing (figure 1.4). According to one story from The Life and Correspondence of William Buckland, D.D., F.R.S. (Gordon [1894]),
He paced like a Franciscan Preacher up and down behind a long show-case, up two steps, in a room in the old Clarendon. He had in his hand a huge hyena’s skull. He suddenly dashed down the steps—rushed, skull in hand, at the first undergraduate on the front bench—and shouted, “What rules the world?” The youth, terrified, threw himself against the next back seat, and answered not a word. He rushed then on me, pointing the hyena full in my face—“What rules the world?” “Haven’t an idea,” I said. “The stomach, sir,” he cried (again mounting his rostrum), “rules the world. The great ones eat the less, and the less the lesser still.”
He even gave lectures on horseback. He wore his heavy academic robes at every lecture and scrambled around outcrops on a field excursion in formal clothes.
Figure 1.4
Woodcut showing Buckland lecturing to spellbound Oxford students, holding up fossils of an ammonite. (Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)
His eccentricities extended to his household, which was loaded with specimens of fossils, minerals, and animals he had collected. He and his wife, Mary Morland (a talented naturalist and illustrator in her own right), would debate which species of fly was buzzing around the table, a common phenomenon in the early 1800s when both men and women were obsessed with natural history. The entire family (nine children, five of whom survived into adulthood) was recruited to collect natural history specimens. Buckland was so enthusiastic about experiencing animals directly that he claimed he had eaten his way through the animal kingdom. The Bucklands tried to make a meal from almost every animal they could obtain, a practice known as zoophagy. Mole and bluebottle fly were apparently the most disgusting, but his guests also record him eating panther, crocodile, and mouse. Another account has them eating (and offering to their guests) crisp mice in golden batter, panther chops, rhino pie, trunk of elephant, crocodile for breakfast, sliced porpoise head, horse's tongue, and kangaroo ham. According to Augustus Hare, in his autobiography The Story of My Life (1900), “talk of strange relics led to mention of the heart of a French king [possibly Louis XIV] preserved at Nuneham in a silver casket. Dr. Buckland, whilst looking at it, exclaimed, ‘I have eaten many strange things, but have never eaten the heart of a king before,’ and, before anyone could hinder him, he had gobbled it up, and the precious relic was lost for ever.”
Buckland had been looking at the huge bones in the Oxford collection from the Stonesfield Slate Quarry for some time. After the end of the Napoleonic Wars, in 1818, the legendary anatomist and paleontologist Baron Georges Cuvier came to Oxford to see these remarkable huge fossils. Cuvier looked at them closely (especially the jaw with its reptilian teeth, many of which were just erupting) and decided they were the remains of a huge lizard. Buckland and his friend William Conybeare continued to call it the “Huge Lizard,” which Conybeare rendered into Greek as Megalosaurus, and informally used that name in 1822 in an unpublished article intended for one of Cuvier’s volumes. James Parkinson published this unofficial name that same year, but luckily this publication had no standing in the codes of zoology (there was no description or any other indications with the name). Finally, on February 20, 1824, Buckland presented a paper on Megalosaurus at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of London. At the same meeting, Conybeare described the first Plesiosaurus, found at Lyme Regis by Mary Anning. A few months later Buckland’s formal descriptions (with illustrations of the bones done by his wife) appeared in the Transactions of the Geological Society of London, giving Megalosaurus official status. Buckland did not give it a species name, however, and in 1826 Ferdinand von Ritgen named it Megalosaurus conybeari. This name never caught on, and in 1827 Gideon Mantell (chapter 2) named it Megalosaurus bucklandii, in honor of the man who described it for science.
Buckland tried to reconstruct what the animal looked like, but he had very little to go on: just a jaw and part of a skull, some hind limb bones, the hip bones, and part of the spinal column (figure 1.5A–B). Because everyone thought it was a huge lizard, nearly all the reconstructions showed it walking on four huge stumpy limbs (figure 1.5B). Analyzing the shape of its hind limbs, Buckland realized that they had been held in an upright vertical posture, so Megalosaurus was not reconstructed as a giant sprawling lizard but as something that had a reptilian head and an elephantine body. In his original 1824 description, Buckland followed Cuvier in suggesting that it was 40 feet long and was as heavy as a 7-foot tall elephant. In the printed version of his lecture (influenced by the huge size of Mantell’s discoveries described in chapter 2), Buckland upped the length estimate to 60 to 70 feet. There was really no way to tell because none of the tail bones were found.
Figure 1.5
Megalosaurus: (A) the only parts of the dinosaur known, as displayed in the Oxford Museum of Natural History; (B) Buckland’s illustration of the jaw with the dagger-like teeth; (C) early reconstruction of Megalosaurus attacking a lizard-like predatory Iguanodon (with the horn on its nose). ([A] photograph by the author; [B–C] Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)
For many people, a huge reptile with wicked looking teeth conflicted with their literal interpretation of the Bible, with the lion lying down by the lamb, and all the animals living in a “peaceable kingdom” before Adam’s fall. Buckland was a good enough naturalist to reject the ridiculous idea that Megalosaurus was a vegetarian with those sharp, slashing teeth (an idea revived by modern-day creationists, who claim that Tyrannosaurus rex used its sharp teeth to open coconuts). Instead, Buckland proposed that God had assigned Megalosaurus a benign role: getting rid of old and sick animals “to diminish the aggregate amount of animal suffering” (in his words).
Figure 1.6
Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins’s concrete sculptures of Megalosaurus, as visualized by Richard Owen, now on display in Crystal Palace Park in Sydenham, South London. (Photograph by the author)
By 1842, Richard Owen had united Megalosaurus with two other discoveries (Iguanodon and Hylaeosaurus) to create the taxon Dinosauria, and the public began to appreciate the diversity of huge extinct monsters. Owen recruited the sculptor Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins to make life-sized models of these amazing creatures for the Great Exhibition of 1851 as part of the incredible Crystal Palace exhibits. These are on display in Crystal Palace Park in Sydenham today where anyone can view them (figure 1.6). Hawkins reconstructed Megalosaurus according to Owen’s directions as a huge lumbering elephantine predator, and in some illustrations they were shown preying on the larger herbivore Iguanodon. Even though the models were grossly inaccurate by modern standards, they were consistent with the then current idea that dinosaurs resembled huge lizards on four limbs. Owen viewed them as “super-reptiles,” and the much smaller modern reptiles were the degenerate successors to them. Unfortunately, at that time there were not enough fossils to prove otherwise. These models were among the first to raise the public consciousness of the existence of dinosaurs, and they stirred the first wave of “dinomania.”
THE REAL MEGALOSAURUS
Since the days of Buckland and Owen, more than 100 specimens of Megalosaurus have accumulated at Oxford, but there are still not enough of all the key bones to assemble a complete skeleton (see figure 1.5A). As the first dinosaur named, and especially the first theropod genus named, it became a sort of archetypical theropod genus, and a huge taxonomic “wastebasket.” Over the years, many hundreds of additional theropod specimens from all over the world—ranging from Tibet and China and India to North America—have been referred to as Megalosaurus. Dozens of species have been named as well. Today most paleontologists reject these additional fragmentary fossils as true specimens of Megalosaurus bucklandii, but these mistakes are still common in the dinosaur literature.
So what was Megalosaurus really like? The original material had almost no front limbs or tail or most of the spine, and only fragments of the skull, so it was very hard to reconstruct it. In 1859, the tiny theropod dinosaur Compsognathus (familiar as part of the inspiration for the pack of tiny “compy” dinosaurs in the second Jurassic Park movie) from the Solnhofen Limestone was described, and the first clearly bipedal dinosaur was entered into the scientific literature. This dinosaur was so small that few thought to compare it to Megalosaurus.
In 1870 workers in the Summertown Brick Pit just north of Oxford found a nearly complete skeleton of another large theropod dinosaur. It was discovered in the Oxford Clay, Middle Jurassic beds just slightly older than the Taynton Limestone that produced Megalosaurus. Due to its strong resemblance to Buckland’s species, it was initially assigned to Megalosaurus bucklandii, but it eventually was named Eustreptospondylus. This skeleton was complete enough to give paleontologists a sense of the proper proportions and posture of Megalosaurus. John Phillips, the scientist who first described the Eustreptospondylus (then called Megalosaurus), soon rearranged the Oxford Megalosaurus fossils in the proper bipedal pose, held in position in the display by cardboard sheets. In the 1870s and 1880s, the discovery of complete skeletons of Allosaurus in North America further confirmed the bipedal posture and limb configurations of smaller theropod dinosaurs. Today most of Buckland’s original fossils are on display at the Oxford Museum of Natural History, with the proper pose (see figure 1.5A).
Many additional types of megalosaurs are now known, many from fairly complete skeletons. With this knowledge, Megalosaurus can be reconstructed with a fair degree of confidence (figure 1.7). It was about 7 meters (23 feet) long and weighed about 1.1 metric tonnes. The inhabitants of the environment of the Stonesfield Slate lived with other large theropods, a few sauropods, and the possible pterosaur Rhamphocephalus on the shores of the great Jurassic seaways that used to flood most of southern England.
Figure 1.7
Modern reconstruction of Megalosaurus. (Courtesy N. Tamura)
The close relatives of Megalosaurus include several other megalosaurids in Europe (such as Eustreptospondylus from England, Wiehenvenator from Germany, and another fragmentary genus known as Duriavenator, from much older Middle Jurassic rocks in Dorset, England). The closest relative of Megalosaurus was the almost T. rex–sized megalosaur Torvosaurus from the Late Jurassic of Portugal—and from the Morrison Formation of Colorado. More distant relatives included the Afrovenatorinae, found mostly in the Jurassic of Europe and Asia, and Afrovenator itself, which is from Africa as the name suggests.
The megalosaurs apparently underwent a significant evolutionary radiation in the Middle Jurassic, and they were widespread on all the continents that once made up the supercontinent of Pangea. By the Middle Jurassic, though, they faced competition from allosaurs in North America and from spinosaurs and their relatives in Africa and Europe. The entire megalosaur radiation seems to have vanished at the end of the Jurassic, except for the Cretaceous spinosaurs.
Megalosaurus, the first dinosaur to be named and discovered, opened the door to the real “Jurassic World” of giant reptiles that ruled the planet. But Megalosaurus itself was always incomplete, was badly misinterpreted and reconstructed, and was almost saddled with the name “Scrotum humanum.”
FOR FURTHER READING
Cadbury, Deborah. The Dinosaur Hunters: A True Story of Scientific Rivalry and the Discovery of the Prehistoric World. New York: Harper Collins, 2000.
——. Terrible Lizard: The First Dinosaur Hunters and the Birth of a New Science. New York: Henry Holt, 2001.
Colbert, Edwin. Men and Dinosaurs: The Search in the Field and in the Laboratory. New York: Dutton, 1968.
Maddox, Brenda. Reading the Rocks: How Victorian Geologists Discovered the Secret of Life. New York: Bloomsbury, 2017.
Mayor, Adrienne. The First Fossil Hunters: Paleontology in Greek and Roman Times. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000.
McGowan, Christopher. The Dragon Seekers: How an Extraordinary Circle of Fossilists Discovered the Dinosaurs and Paved the Way for Darwin. New York: Perseus, 2001.
Naish, Darren. The Great Dinosaur Discoveries. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009.
Oke, Elizabeth. The Life and Correspondence of William Buckland, Sometime Dean of Westminster. New York: Forgotten Books, 2012.
Rudwick, Martin. Bursting the Limits of Time: Reconstructing Geohistory in the Age of Revolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.
——. The Meaning of Fossils: Episodes in the History of Paleontology. New York: Science History, 1976.
——. Worlds Before Adam: Reconstructing Geohistory in the Age of Reform. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010.
Spaulding, David A. E. Dinosaur Hunters: Eccentric Amateurs and Obsessed Professionals. Rocklin, Calif.: Prima, 1993.