Megalosaurus: the first dinosaur to ever be scientifically named

Misha Glenny (0:00)

This is one of more than a thousand episodes that you can find in the In Our Time Archive. A reading list for this edition can be found in the episode description wherever you're listening. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello.

On February the 20th, 1824, a man called William Buckland stood before the annual meeting of the Geological Society of London. He had been studying some large fossilized bones, which didn't resemble those of any living creature. And as he told his rapt audience at that meeting, he had a new name for this mysterious and unusual creature. Megalosaurus. This is the first ever dinosaur to be scientifically named, and that, 20 years before the word dinosaur had been invented.

But it kickstarted the last 200 years of dinosaur science, which has changed the way we understand our planet and life upon it. Well, with me to discuss Megalosaurus, I'm joined by Emily Rayfield, Professor of Paleobiology at the University of Bristol, Emma Nicholls, Vertebrate Paleontologist and Collections Manager at Oxford University Museum of Natural History, and Steve Brusatte, Professor of Paleontology and Evolution at the University of Edinburgh. And it's to Steve Brusatte, I'd like to come first. Steve, can you set the scene for us? What's going on in geology at the start of the 19th century?

Steve Brusatte (1:36)

This is at the beginning of the 1800s, and this was a very different time from today, especially here in Britain.

It hadn't been too long before really that you had Newton, you had Galileo, you had Kepler, and these new ideas about the place of the Earth in the cosmos, and of course what that meant for our place in the cosmos. Now in the early 1800s, people were starting to think more about our place on the Earth. Where did humans come from? How do humans fit in?

How old is the Earth? These were big questions that were being discussed by the geologists and the naturalists of the day, and this was also around the same time that professional scientists at universities and museums were starting to stake a claim, this new career of being a scientist. This was the world that Buckland came into, and this was a very conservative world. This was, here in Britain, the culture was very traditional, very Christian. This was a time when most people went to church every week, when most people had a Bible in their home, when most people turned to the Bible, not just for questions of morality, but also for questions about science, about nature, about our place in the world. And in the early 1800s, at this time, all of a sudden, all around Britain, and in other parts of the world, but especially here, these large mysterious bones started to emerge from the ground. As people were building canals, as people were mining rock, and these impossible monsters, these giant, weird reptilian creatures, this was like a thunderbolt. What were these things? What did they imply about the earth and the age of the earth and the position of people on this planet?

Misha Glenny (3:26)

So, I mentioned at the start this fellow, William Buckland. Can you tell us a bit about him? He sounds like quite a character.

Steve Brusatte (3:34)

Yeah, it's hard to talk about Buckland without making it seem so hyperbolic that he's some sort of invention of a mad screenwriter. But Buckland really was, I think, like the original nutty professor. You know, he taught at Oxford.

He would give lectures in his academic robes. He loved academic robes, and I'll return to that in a second. But if he was in this room, he'd be pacing up and down in his robes. He'd have an animal skull in one hand, an ammonite in another hand. He'd be shoving these things into people's faces, asking his students what they are. He'd be impersonating animals the way they walk. He loved animals. He had a pet bear at his house, which he dressed in academic robes.

He loved eating animals. His all-time dream was to eat his way through the animal kingdom, and he would have these dinner parties where he'd serve mice on toast and porpoise and possum and penguin.

But at the same time, he was a very devoutly religious man. His father was a rector in the Anglican Church. He was an ordained minister, and he was a performer. He really was. He was a pretty well-known figure in the university and academic world. He corresponded with all the other learned men of the time. He knew Darwin. In fact, Darwin found him a little bit vulgar, a little bit too much of a self-promoter. But this is who Buckland was. And the last thing I'll say about Buckland is that there's a crazy story about him, which for a long time people thought wasn't true, but it turns out from everything I've read that it actually could be. And that is that not only did he want to eat his way through the animal kingdom, but also apparently ate the pickled heart of King Louis XIV of France. It was presented to him, this pickled heart, and he took it out of the box and plopped it in his mouth. Now, it was thought to be a tall tale for a long time, but actually a lot of historians have followed up on this, and they think that is more likely to be true than not. So even if it's not true, the fact that story exists, that legend exists, I think, tells you something about Buckland.