Buckland names Megalosaurus

In 1824 William Buckland, a clergyman and geology professor at Oxford, published a description of a giant fossil lizard from the Stonesfield slate quarries of Oxfordshire, naming it Megalosaurus, the great lizard. The jaw, teeth, vertebrae, pelvis and limb bones had been found by quarrymen over several years. Buckland imagined an animal about 12 m long, a crocodile-like lizard on four legs, larger than anything alive. Modern work shows a two-legged predator of about 6 to 9 m that lived about 166 million years ago in the Middle Jurassic.¹²³

The fossils were already known. In 1677 Robert Plot had drawn the knobbly end of a thigh bone from Oxfordshire and decided it belonged to a giant human or an elephant. In 1763 Richard Brookes put the name Scrotum humanum on a copy of that picture, which is still a funny and embarrassing footnote. In 1822 Gideon Mantell had found teeth in Sussex that became Iguanodon, but Buckland published first. Georges Cuvier, who had seen the bones in Oxford in 1818, agreed that they were reptilian.¹²

Megalosaurus became the first dinosaur named, because Iguanodon was named in 1825. Neither scholar knew they were studying a new kind of animal, but the idea was gathering weight that there had been an age of giant reptiles before humans. In 1842 Richard Owen built the new group Dinosauria on Megalosaurus, Iguanodon and Hylaeosaurus.¹³