MARGINALIA
American Dinosaurs: Who and What Was First
Who gets credit for the first dinosaur in North America depends on one's definition of a description and a fossil
Keith Thomson
1824: Early English Dinosaurs
The first ever description of a dinosaur fossil had been by Robert
Plot, first director of the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford in his
Natural History of Oxford-shire of 1677. It was the
distal end of a femur and had been found in the village of Cornwell
in Oxfordshire. Plot gave an excellent drawing of the bone, but
identified it as the thigh bone of a human giant. (Every
paleontology student also knows that in 1772, the naturalist Richard
Brookes turned Plot's figure upside down and, noting a startling
resemblance to male genitalia, gave it its first formal name:
Scrotum humanum. Probably because of this notoriety,
the original specimen has long since disappeared.)
In 1824 William Buckland at Oxford, describing a suite of fossils
from the nearby village of Stonesfield, gave Plot's creature the
name Megalosaurus. Enough of it was preserved to show that
Megalosaurus was a flesh-eating reptile some 40 feet long.
Buckland's publication was the first modern, scientific description
of dinosaur remains, even though he, not unreasonably, thought it
was a giant lizard; the discrete category "dinosaur" was
only defined by the British zoologist Richard Owen, first director
of the Natural History Museum in London, in 1842.
Buckland had been obtaining Megalosaurus material from
private collectors for at least a decade, and the existence and
nature of his fossils were already well known in the scientific
community. Unsure what the creature was, Buckland was finally pushed
into publishing by the great French zoologist and paleontologist
Georges Cuvier, who wanted to include the Oxfordshire monster in a
new edition of his grand compendium Recherches sur les Ossemens
Fossiles des Quadrupedes (1824).
Because of his vacillations, Buckland almost missed being first into
print with a dinosaur (after Plot, that is). The accomplished
amateur paleontologist Gideon Mantell had been busy collecting in
the Tilgate Forest region of Sussex and had already mentioned his
finds in his book Fossils of the South Downs (1822) as
"the teeth, vertebrae, bones, and other remains of an animal of
the lizard tribe of enormous magnitude." The same fossils were
noted in The Gentleman's Magazine in 1823, and Cuvier
included a reference to the teeth in his Ossemens Fossiles.
But even Cuvier was not sure what Mantell's creature was; he thought
the teeth might have been from a fish but "it is not impossible
that they also came from a saurian, but a saurian even more
extraordinary than all that we now know." Unable to obtain the
imprimatur of Cuvier and perhaps due to Buckland's competitiveness,
Mantell could not get a formal paper published on his discovery
until early 1825. He identified his animal as a plant-eating reptile
and named it Iguanodon (because of the resemblance of its
teeth to those of a living iguana). Seven years later, Mantell
described his second dinosaur: Hylaeosaurus, a somewhat
smaller, spikey creature, also a herbivore.
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