Gideon Mantell
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| Gideon Mantell | |
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 Gideon Mantell 1790 - 1852
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| Born | February 3, 1790 Lewes, Sussex, England, UK |
| Died | 29 November 1852 November 10, London, England, UK |
Gideon Algernon Mantell (February 3, 1790 – November 10, 1852) was an English obstetrician, geologist and palaeontologist. He is credited with discovering the first fossils identified as originating from a dinosaur, which were teeth belonging to an Iguanodon.
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[edit] Early life and medical career
Mantell was born in Lewes, Sussex, the son of a shoemaker. He was apprenticed to a surgeon in Lewes, in 1805 and received his diploma as a Member of the Royal College of Surgeons, in 1811. In 1816, he married Mary Ann Woodhouse, purchased his own medical practice and took up an appointment at the Royal Artillery Hospital, at Ringmer, Lewes.
Mantell was a dedicated and hard-working obstetrician, physician and surgeon, who regularly saw dozens of patients each day — on one occasion he attended sixty in a single day, during a typhus epidemic. Although mainly occupied with running his busy country medical practice in Lewes, he spent his little free time pursuing his passion, geology, often working into the early hours of the morning. He published his first paper, on the geology of the environs of Lewes, in 1813.
[edit] Geological research
Inspired by the sensational discovery, by Mary Anning at Lyme Regis in Dorset, of a fossilised animal resembling a huge crocodile (later identified as an ichthyosaur), Mantell became passionately interested in the study of the fossilised animals and plants which were being found in his area. The fossils he had collected from the region, known as The Weald in Sussex, were from the chalk downlands covering the county. The chalk is part of the Upper Cretaceous ("chalk") Period and the fossils it contains are marine in origin.
But by 1819, Mantell had begun acquiring fossils from a quarry, at Whiteman's Green, near Cuckfield. These included the remains of terrestrial and freshwater ecosystems, at a time when all the known fossil remains from Cretaceous England, hitherto, were marine in origin. He named the new strata the Strata of Tilgate Forest, after an historical wooded area and it was later shown to belong to the Lower Cretaceous.
By 1820, he had started to find very large bones at Cuckfield, even larger than those discovered by William Buckland, at Stonesfield in Oxfordshire. Then, in 1822, shortly before finishing his first book (The Fossils of South Downs), he found several large teeth (although some historians contend that they were in fact discovered by his wife), the origin of which he could not identify.
In 1821 Mantell planned his next book on the geology of Sussex. It was an immediate success with two hundred subscribers including a letter from king George IV at Carlton house palace which read "His majesty is pleased to command that his name should be placed at the head of the subscription list for four copies."
How the king heard of Mantell is unknown, but Mantell's response is. Galvanised and encouraged, Mantell showed the teeth to other scientists but they were dismissed as belonging to a fish or mammal and from a more recent rock layer than the other Tilgate Forest fossils. The eminent French anatomist, Georges Cuvier, identified the teeth as those of a rhinoceros.
Although according to Charles Lyell, Cuvier made this statement after a late party and apparently had some doubts when reconsidering the matter when he awoke, fresh in the morning. "The next morning he told me that he was confident that it was something quite different." Strangely, this change of opinion did not make it back to Britain where Mantell was mocked for his error.
Mantell was still convinced that the teeth had come from the Mesozoic strata and finally recognized that they resembled those of the iguana, but were twenty times larger. He surmised that the owner of the remains must have been at least 60 feet (18 metres) in length.
[edit] Recognition
He tried in vain to convince his peers that the fossils were from Mesozoic strata, by carefully studying rock layers. Sir Richard Owen famously disputed Mantell's assertion, by claiming that the teeth were of mammalian origins.
When it was proved Mantell was correct the only question was what to call his new reptile. His original name was Iguanasaurus but he then received a letter from William Daniel Conybeare, "Your discovery of the analogy between the Iguana and the fossil teeth is very interesting but the name you propose will hardly do, because it is equally applicable to the recent iguana. Iguanoides or Iguanodon would be better." Mantell took this advice to heart and called his creature Iguanodon.
Years later, Mantell had acquired enough fossil evidence to show that the dinosaur's forelimbs were much shorter than its hind legs, therefore ruling out any mammal. Mantell went on to demonstrate that fossil vertebrae, which Owen had attributed to a variety of different species, all belonged to Iguanodon. He also named a new species of dinosaur called Hylaeosaurus and as a result became an authority on prehistoric reptiles.
[edit] Later years
In 1833, Mantell relocated to Brighton but his medical practice suffered. He was almost rendered destitute, but for the town's council who promptly transformed his house into a museum. The museum in Brighton ultimately failed as a result of Mantell's habit of waiving the entrance fee. Finally destitute, Mantell offered to sell the entire collection to the British Museum, in 1838, for £5,000, accepting the counter-offer of £4,000. He moved to Clapham Common in South London, where he continued his work as a doctor.
Mary Mantell left her husband in 1839. That same year, Gideon's son Walter emigrated to New Zealand (Walter later sent his father some important fossils from New Zealand). His daughter Hannah died in 1840.
Mantell suffered a terrible carriage accident on Clapham Common, in 1841 and was left with a debilitating spinal injury. Despite being bent over with crippling deformity and in constant pain, he continued to work with fossilized reptiles and published a number of scientific books and papers, until his death. He moved to Pimlico in 1844 and began to take opium, as a painkiller, in 1845.
[edit] Death and legacy
In 1852, Mantell took an overdose of opium and later lapsed into a coma. He died that afternoon. His post-mortem showed that he had been suffering from scoliosis. Richard Owen, his one-time nemesis, had a section of Mantell's spine removed, pickled and stored on a shelf at the Royal College of Surgeons of England. It remained there until World War II when it was lost, presumably destroyed, during a German bombing raid.
Mantell's surgery, on the south side of Clapham Common, is now a dental surgery.
In 2000, in commemoration of Mantell's discovery and his contribution to the science of palaeontology, The Mantell Monument was unveiled at Whiteman's Green, Cuckfield. The monument has been confirmed as the location of the Iguanodon fossils Mantell first described, in 1822. He is buried within a sarcophagus at West Norwood Cemetery.
[edit] References
- Dean, Dennis R. Gideon Mantell and the Discovery of Dinosaurs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. ISBN 0-521-42048-2
- McGowan, Christopher. The Dragon Seekers: How an Extraordinary Circle of Fossilists Discovered the Dinosaurs and Paved the Way for Darwin. Cambridge: Perseus Publishing, 2001. ISBN 0-7382-0282-7
[edit] External links
- A History of Dinosaur Hunting and Reconstruction
- NNDB
- Gideon Mantell Biography at Strange Science.net
