The Discovery of Dragons : Palaeontology in the Victorian Age

When Robert Plot, an Oxford professor discovered in 1677, the enormous thighbone of a dinosaur, he assumed it was from a giant human.
“How absurd!,” one could say. “ Giants?- We may as well believe in the Loch Ness Monster!” It is perhaps ironic that we, the children of the twentieth century, have grown up smugly believing that our world is billions of years old and that giant lizards once roamed the earth. There is nothing that a seventeenth century gentleman of letters would find more absurd.

It is easy for us to take for granted the advances made by previous generations. It is even easier for us to suppose that the fields of study that made those advances possible have always existed. Of course this is not so. Astronomy is old: the iconic stuctures at Stonehenge mark the rising sun on Summer Solstice. Medicine is old: for as long as humanity and our attendant diseases have existed, so has the imperative to cure them. Microbiology is just a babe: Leewenhoek peered down his unique new instrument, the microscope, just three hundred odd years ago. But palaeontology?.. surely if the remains of creatures trapped in rock are hundreds of millions of years old, then they must have been found, examined and pondered over for hundreds if not thousands of years.
Not so. The science that brought us the towering dinosaur skeletons that almost define our modern image of a museum is only a little over one hundred years old. That is not to say that remains of the giants were not found earlier------ after all, we’ve all read fairy tales haven’t we? Monsters, princesses and dragons…

3. Etching of the model workshop for "prehistoric park" at the Crystal Palace exhibition.

At the beginning of the Victorian era (which I will always associate with the last great age of natural history collecting), in 1824 to be precise, William Buckland published the first scientific dinosaur account. He described the owner of that dubious thighbone, and correctly identified it as not coming from a giant human, but rather from a giant reptile. He named his newly identified creature Megalosaurus, meaning ‘giant lizard’.
This too, was not quite correct. It wasn’t until Richard Owen gave them their own scientific classification and name in 1842 that ‘Dinosaurs’ entered the world’s scientific theatre. It didn’t take long for them to take centre stage. In 1851 the Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace in Sydenham featured a “ prehistoric park” filled with sculptures of the newest stars of palaeontology: Megalosaurus, Iguanodon and Hyleaosaurus.
The sculptures, built by famous palaeontologist Waterhouse Hawkins and supervised by Owen himself, captured the imaginations of the Victorian public. This was the stuff of legend. Now even the greatest geologists and scientists of the day had to admit what the fairy tales had said all along: monsters and dragons were real.

The palaeontological artefacts of the Victorian era have the double distinction of being not only fossils, but also antiques. The fact of their having been collected and identified at such a pivitol time in the history of the science of palaeontology gives them a second layer of meaning. There are, for instance, in the British Natural History Museum collection, a number of very fine fossil specimens collected by Mary Anning. Anning is described by Stephen Jay Gould in his book Finders Keepers as:
“ Probably the most important unsung ( or inadequately sung) collecting force in the history of palaeontology.”