Terrible Lizard: The First Dinosaur Hunters and the Birth of a New Science

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Summary: Interesting story about the first dinosaur hunters
Review: An absorbing account of the pioneer 19th-century British geologists and fossil collectors. Our hero is Gideon Mantell, of a noble family long fallen on hard times. The son of a shoemaker, Mantell was smitten with fossils at an early age. Without resources but recognized as a prodigy, he was apprenticed to a surgeon and became a doctor in London. For the rest of his life he would balance his unenthusiastic practice of medicine with a passionate devotion to fossils. Enter one Mary Anning, who supported her family by gathering fossil "trinkets" from the dangerous coastal cliffs of Dorset to sell to tourists. Her keen eye led to her recognition as a prime "fossilist" among geologists and collectors, including Mantell. One of her major finds was the fossil remains of a giant sea lizard; little by little, other huge reptilian bones were unearthed by Mary and others, but not without controversy. Mantell waited years before the eminent Baron Cuvier in Paris agreed that he had found the remains of a huge herbivorous land reptile (reversing his earlier opinion that the fossil was mammalian). But the plot thickened with the appearance of the wicked Richard Owen, who rose to pinnacles of power within the Royal Society and the Geological Society, became a social lion, and was an intimate of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. At every step of the way he did his best to discredit and ridicule Mantell, at the same time claiming some of Mantell's fossils as his own. His comeuppance (and the recognition of Mantell's true worth) was the result of both his egregious behavior and his being on the wrong (creationist) side of the evolutionary debate as the scientific tide turned to Darwinian theory. "He lied for God and for malice," an Oxford don declared. "A bad case." A scholarly account infused with a rare drama and suspense: read it not only for the science, but to learn what happened to all these wonderful characters.

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Summary: Bitter bones
Review: Deborah Cadbury does the burgeoning genre of popular science proud with this book. It has all the necessary elements. A human interest story with heroes and villians, an interesting historical setting and a good scientific foundation. The history and science revolves around the gigantic fossilized bones that were being discovered throughout southern England in the early 19th century. Paleontology and Geology were just beginning as sciences. Evolution was a concept but not yet a theory as this was pre-Darwin's ORIGIN OF SPECIES. Indeed in 1812 when an uneducated and simple villager named Mary Anning found a gigantic skeleton on a beach under the Dorset cliffs, there was nothing else to call it but a monster. The word "dinosaur" didn't exist. It was coined in 1842 by Richard Owen, one of the principal characters in this story.

Mary's discovery started the great quest to identify, categorize, name and date these bones. We meet Gideon Mantell, the poor son of a shoemaker who by dint of hard work and education became a country doctor and a member of the scientific community. He is the sympathetic character this story revolves around and the author wants us to embrace him. Mantell was one of THE DINOSAUR HUNTERS which is in fact the more appropriate title used for this book's edition in Britain. Mantell was typical of these amateur paleontologists who were combing southern England in the hopes of making some great discovery. It's true that only some were eccentric but it's also fair to say they all shared an obsession for bones. Mantell filled his home with fossils, developing one of the finest private collections in England. His devotion to the world of dead creatures came at a cost. It drained all the life out of his marriage and his wife left him in 1839. Mantell did at least have some success, discovering the skeleton of what would later be named the Iguanadon. That's about the only success he had though and his life story as told here is one of disappointment and bitterness with a sad ending.

If Mantell is the sympathetic character then the opposite emotional responses should be directed towards Richard Owen. Cadbury paints a very unflattering portrait of the man (Sir Richard eventually) who founded the Natural History Museum, invented "Dinosauria", and was consulted by royalty, prime ministers, and academia on all things fossilized. The author says he was "instinctively predatory" and if Cadbury rather than her publishers chose the title for the book, then it's very appropriate as it's quite clear from her writing who she sees as the TERRIBLE LIZARD.

Mantell is reminiscent of William "Strata" Smith in THE MAP THAT CHANGED THE WORLD. The same disdain as shown by the scientific elite and similar financial difficulties. Smith's story however had an ultimately redeeming end. Not so here. Mantell had to sell his fossil collection to the Natural History Museum and following a carriage accident which badly damaged his spine and left him with severe backaches he declined rapidly. He died from an ovedose of the opiates that he took to relieve the pain. Owen's success had been at the direct expense of Mantell as he had been quite willing to claim Mantell's work as his own. From his well connected position within the scientific community Owen was very effective in preventing recognition for others and garnering it for himself. A bit of poetic justice arrived by way of Thomas Huxley who discredited some of Owen's work (specifically his view on the differences between human and ape brains). In doing so Huxley did in large measure what Owen had done to Mantell. Owen had also argued that Dinosaurs were proof against evolution. He reasoned that since evolution said life progressed it was impossible then that ancient and extinct creatures should be more splendid than those living today. Since fossils proved that dinosaurs were in fact many times more magnificent that the reptiles Owen saw around him, then evolution must be wrong he said. If Huxley embarrassed him then Darwin's stunning and well reasoned theory of evolution published in 1859 pretty much put paid to Owen's arguments. He outlived Darwin but only to his chagrin as he finally accepted the reality of Darwinism and the sting of being bettered scientifically.

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Summary: Witness the Birth of A New Science
Review: The story of how a few great and nimble minds knocked relentlessly at the doors of established scientific thought and were, by dint of excellent work and bold imagination, eventually admitted.
From the painstaking, earnest and underappreciated Gideon Mantell to the flamboyant and eccentric Dean Buckland. From Sir Richard Owen, perhaps the finest comparative anatomist of his time, to the poverty-stricken fossilist Mary Anning here is a tale of fortunes won and lost and discoveries celebrated and forgotten, where brilliance walks hand in hand with heartache and madness...
Best of all, its true.