How dinosaurs changed the science and society of Victorian England

This year marks the 200th anniversary of one of the weirdest and most reality-shifting moments in science. On Feb. 20, 1824, at the annual meeting of the Geological Society in London, the world was introduced to the very first dinosaur: the megalosaurus.

Before a packed crowd, Oxford geologist William Buckland shared details of a creature unlike anything “civilized” society had ever dared imagine. It was so new, even the word “dinosaur” hadn’t been coined yet; that would take another 18 years.

Buckland “did not have anything like a complete skeleton to show his fellow geologists, but he had seen enough bones and teeth for a mental reconstruction,” writes Edward Dolnick in his new book, “Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party: How an Eccentric Group of Victorians Discovered Prehistoric Creatures and Accidentally Upended the World” (Scribner, out now).

The megalosaurus — a hybrid of two Greek words: mega, meaning “giant,” and saurus, meaning “lizard” — whose skeletal remains had been discovered near Oxfordshire, England, was a “meat eater and a reptile” that stood “upright like a mammal” and was “more than twice as long as a crocodile and twice as massive as a rhinoceros,” Buckland explained during his lecture.

Buckman, with his gift for oratory and showman’s flair, “painted a garish picture for his enthralled audience,” Dolnick writes. He also “lumbered about the stage,” imitating the ungainly movements of one of the largest carnivores of the middle Jurassic era. His audience, Dolnick writes, “roared in delight.”

It’s impossible to overstate just how staggering this news was to the general public, who were “blindsided in a way that people in today’s world — who have known about the search for ET for decades — could never be.” Imagine living in a world where one morning, every animal that ever existed still walked the earth, and not much had changed since the Garden of Eden story in the Bible. But the next day, you were told, “Oh wait, we were wrong. Gigantic flesh-eating lizards were here first, like something out of your worst nightmare.”

These Victorians were “the first generations to confront the reality of dinosaurs,” writes Dolnick. And they responded with the same fascination and dread of any 6-year-old kid today. Dinosaurs were “the best sort of monsters — big, scary, and, best of all, dead,” writes Dolnick.

The theatricality of scientists like Buckman was essential at the time, given how few bones had been discovered and how little was actually known about the creatures they belonged to. It was a bit like solving a murder without an entire body. “Instead, most often, they had only a few bones or teeth, and their task was to imagine a body from those scanty hints,” writes Dolnick. 

Dinosaur bones weren’t exactly new discoveries, but the explanations were. Many of the same bones that Buckland imagined as belonging to a megalosaurus had been found in the 17th century, discovered by workmen digging in a quarry about 20 miles from Oxford University, and the best guesses of scientists at the time were that they originated from either an elephant, or even more absurdly, “a pair of enormous testicles from a bygone human giant,” writes Dolnick. 

Dinosaur fossils became more commonplace in the early 1800s, mostly because “the Industrial Revolution brought a frenzy of digging of all sorts,” writes Dolnick. The deeper that workers tore into the earth with picks and shovels, building canals and tunnels and quarries, the more behemothic bones they began to uncover. And every skeletal fragment brought the same questions: Whose bones were these?

The discoveries turned some of the scientists and fossil finders into celebrities. Like Gideon Mantell, a “handsome, charming country doctor,” writes Dolnick, from Sussex, south of London. In 1822, he (or perhaps his wife, while accompanying him on a house call) stumbled upon some mysterious (and gigantic) fossil teeth in West Sussex.

Despite his discovery being repeatedly rebuffed by paleontologists as having “no particular interest,” he took the bones to London’s Hunterian Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons — named for the surgeon who inspired Mary Shelley’s mad scientist, Victor Frankenstein. After comparing his find with endless drawers of reptilian teeth and jaws, Mantell realized that his “large fossil teeth looked strikingly like the iguana’s small teeth in every respect but size,” writes Dolnick.

He named this new creature “Iguanodon,” a name that’s still used today. “Like Frankenstein,” Mantell later wrote, “I was struck with astonishment at the enormous monster which my investigations had, as it were, called into existence.”

Mantell went on to draw large, enthusiastic crowds, who were “bowled over by word of a 10-ton lizard,” writes Dolnick. But what’s remarkable wasn’t just what he discovered, by how he put together the puzzle pieces. “It was not just that he had fashioned a dinosaur from a few discolored teeth and some fractured bones,” writes Dolnick. “The genuine coup was imagining such a beast in the first place. To dig up a dinosaur would have been a feat; to dream up a dinosaur was better still.”

Not all of the pioneers in the golden age of dinosaur fossils were so lucky. Mary Anning was a poor and uneducated young woman from a small town on the English Channel who hunted relics to raise money for her family. In 1812, while digging for fossils on a beach in Lyme Regis, she unearthed the skeleton of an “enormous dolphin-like creature, seventeen feet long… with huge jaws and daunting teeth,” writes Dolnick. This “tyrant of the deep,” as one scientist described it, was later named an ichthyosaurus (“fish lizard”), but Anning had no say in its naming.

“Names were bestowed by scientists, not unlettered girls,” writes Dolnick. “A local landowner paid £23 for her find, and that was money enough to put food on the table for six months.”