200 years of the great Fossil Lizard of Stonesfield

 

Megalosaurus’ jaw and teeth drawn by Mary Buckland. From Buckland, 1824.

On 20 February 1824, William Buckland read at a meeting of the Geological Society of London, the first scientific report of a large carnivore animal, the Megalosaurus: “I AM induced to lay before the Geological Society the annexed representations of parts of the skeleton of an enormous fossil animal, found at Stonesfield near Woodstock, about twelve miles to the north-west of Oxford… The detached bones here represented must have belonged to several individuals of various ages and sizes; there are others in the Oxford Museum which are derived from a very young animal; in the same stratum with them there occur also fragments of large bones, of similar structure, which have been rolled to the state of pebbles. Although the known parts of the skeleton are at present very limited, they are yet sufficient to determine the place of the animal in the zoological system. Whilst the vertebral column and extremities much resemble those of quadrupeds, the teeth show the creature to have been oviparous, and to have belonged to the order of Saurians, or Lizards” (Buckland 1824: 390).

Buckland was in the possesion of a piece of a lower jaw, some vertebrae, and fragments of a pelvis, a scapula and hind limbs, probably not all from the same individual. Buckland’s published description was based on specimens in the Ashmolean Museum, in the collection of Gideon Algernon Mantell of Lewes in Sussex and a sacrum donated by Henry Warburton (1784–1858).

Plate from Plot’s 1677 book The Natural History of Oxford-shire with his illustration of the lower extremity of the famed femur .

The first finds of large bones from the Stonesfield Quarries were made in the late 17th century. Robert Plot (1640-1696), Oxford’s first Professor of Chemistry and first Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum, described and illustrated a distal fragment of a large femur that he interpreted as the remains of a giant man, like those mentioned in the Bible, or of some other animal,  in his monumental work “A natural history of Oxford-shire.”   The fossil came into Plot’s hands through Sir Thomas Pennyston. In 1763,  Richard Brookes, re-described the fossil and named “Scrotum humanum“, but the label was not considered a proper Linnaean name and was not used in posterior literature. 

But probably the first description of a definite dinosaur bone from Stonesfield was made by James Platt at a meeting of the Royal Society of London on February 2, 1758. The paper was published as “An account of the fossile thigh-bone of a large animal, dug up at Stonesfield, near Woodstock in Oxfordshire, in a letter to Mr. Peter Collinson, F.R.S. from Mr Joshua Platt”. After Platt’s death in 1776 his collection was sold at auction including the original Stonesfield thigh bone. 

Megalosaurus sacrum with fused vertebrae (from Buckland 1824, pl. 42).

Sir Christopher Pegge, Regius Professor of Anatomy, in Oxford, also played a key role in the description and discovery of Megalosaurus. In 1797, he acquired the iconic right dentary of Megalosaurus for the collection  of the Christ Church Anatomy School. Buckland attended Pegge’s lectures in Oxford. Thanks to his connections with Pegge and his friendship with William Conybeare, Buckland knew about  the Stonesfield jaw and Henry Warburton’s sacrum, presented to the Geological Society of London in June 1817. Two other important contributor  to the story were the  famous anatomist George Cuvier, and Mary Morland.

Mary Buckland, from an original photograph in the possession of Mrs. Phyllis Cursham (Wikimedia Commons)

Mary was born in Abingdon, Berkshire in 1797. She was the eldest daughter of the solicitor Benjamin Morland and his wife Harriet Baster. After her mother’s death she spent much of her childhood in the house of Sir Christopher Pegge and his wife. Pegge encouraged Mary’s scientific curiosity.

She later made models of fossils for the Oxford museum and repaired broken fossils. She met Buckland in 1818 and helped him with his geological researches and illustrated some of his work like Reliquiae Diluvianae (1823) and the 1824 Megalosaurus paper. She also illustrated some of George Cuvier’s work. In her correspondence with Cuvier, Mary included drawings of some of the Stonesfield bones.

William Buckland (1784-1856).

In 1818 Cuvier went to England and visited Buckland. After examined the bones. He agreed with Buckland that the Stonesfield bones belonged to a giant reptile. Six years later, Cuvier wrote a letter to thank Mary Morland for her drawings, and Buckland for the fossils from Stonesfield.

William Buckland took up the presidency of the Geological Society in 1824. He and Mary Morland married on December 31, 1825. The same year that Iguanodon entered in the books of History.

Iguanodon battling Megalosaurus by Édouard Riou. From Wikimedia Commons

Megalosaurus became so popular that is mentioned in Charles Dickens’s novel Bleak House: “Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill.” It was the first appearance of a dinosaur in popular literature.

References:

Buckland, W. (1824). Notice on the Megalosaurus or great fossil lizard of Stonesfield, Transactions of the Geological Society of London (2) 1: 390-396.

Plot, R., (1677). The natural history of Oxford-shire, being an essay towards the natural history of England, Oxford.

Platt, J., (1758). An account of the fossil thigh-bone of a large animal, dug up at Stonesfield, near Woodstock in Oxfordshire. Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society 50: 524-527.

Howlett, E. A., Kennedy, W. J., Powell, H. P., & Torrens, H. S. (2017).. New light on the history of Megalosaurus, the great lizard of Stonesfield. Archives of natural history, 44(1), 82-102.

Forgotten women of Paleontology: Carol Heubusch Faul

Carol Heubusch Faul (1934-1989). Image credit: Buffalo Museum of Science.

The lack of diversity in Geosciences is a long-standing issue. The  geoscientist is often seen as an athletic, bearded white male, and that stereotype has created an “image problem” that prevents minorities from applying for research opportunities. The  problem is even bigger for people with disabilities. In 1978, during a conference for Science Education for Handicapped Student, Carol Heubusch Faul, a geologist and paleontologist, presented GEOLOGY AS A CAREER FOR THE DISABLE, a resume about the “problems and solutions for the orthopedically disabled geology student and the professional geologist” (1).

Carol Heubusch was born in Buffalo, New York, in 1934. She contracted polio when was a teenager. As a consequence, she had lower-body paralysis. Despite the prejudices, she decided to study geology, and attended at the University of Buffalo. She obteined a master degree and soon later began working at the Buffalo Museum of Science in 1955.

In 1959 she became the museum’s Curator of Geology. The same year she participated in the excavations by the Buffalo Museum of Science at the recent discovered Byron Dig site, and wrote about the findings, that included several teeth and fragmentary mastodon bones.

Carol Heubusch at the Byron Dig/Hiscock site, c. 1959. Image credit: Buffalo Museum of Science.

In 1962, after departed the museum, she became the only woman elected to the Council of the Geological Society of America. Four years later she married with Henry Faul, and joined her husband, at the Department of Geology in the University of Pennsylvania. Henry Faul (1920–1981) was a prominent geologist who worked on Enrico Fermi’s team at the University of Chicago, and later participated in the Manhattan Project. 

In 1974, Carol and her husband taught in Shiraz, Iran, and collected Permian fossils. They later wrote a book: It began with a stone: A history of geology from the Stone Age to the age of plate tectonics. The book was published in 1983, after Henry’s death and completed by Carol. In the preface, she wrote: “Readers will note that there is a paucity of women mentioned in this history of the Earth sciences. I wish to acknowledge the contributions of the multitude of anonymous women who were surely there influencing the ‘founders’ of geology.”

Carol Heubusch Faul also wrote A history of geology at the University of Pennsylvania: Benjamin Franklin and the rest (1985), and coauthored two more books (Explorations in Doughty’s Arabia Deserta, and A history of geology and geological education in China).  She died in 1989.

References:

Faul, C. 1978. Geology as a career for the disabled. Pp. 150–153 in H. Hofman, ed. A Working Conference on Science Education for Handicapped Students: Proceedings (April 3–5, 1978). ERIC (1)

Faul, H., and C. Faul. 1983. It began with a stone: A history of geology from the Stone Age to the age of plate tectonics. J. Wiley, New York.

Dutt, K. Race and racism in the geosciences. Nat. Geosci. 13, 2–3 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-019-0519-z