To the River (5 page)

Fossils are often at odds with the regions in which they’re found, the stony remains of shellfish, cuttlefish and oysters abandoned many miles from the shore, and so it was generally held in the West that they were
reliquiae diluvianae
, relics left behind when the great waters that God unleashed across the world subsided, and Noah and his ark ran aground on the mountain of Ararat. This belief, gradually and categorically disproven, remains stubbornly persistent, clinging on today in the pseudo-scientific ‘flood geology’ of the creationists, who invoke mighty geysers and rents in the earth’s tectonic plates in their bid to explain where sufficient water came from and drained to that did prevail so exceedingly upon the earth that it was sunk to the depth of fifteen cubits.

In the town where Matthew grew up they told a different story of Noah’s flood, replacing the creationist piety with low English comedy. The medieval Wakefield Mystery Play has at its centre a pitched battle between Noah and his stubborn wife that culminates with an exchange of blows and insults
– ramshit! Nichol needy!
– that would make Punch and Judy blush. And when the rain stops and the ship with its cargo of paired beasts reaches land, Noah is not thrilled but horrified by the spectacle that awaits him, of a featureless earth that might never have been inhabited. ‘Behold, on this green,’ he cries:

. . . neither cart nor plough

Is left on the scene, neither tree nor bough,

Nor other thing,

But all is away:

Many castles, I say

Great towns of array

Flit in this flooding.

Typical Yorkshireman, I thought to myself: never bloody happy. But you don’t have to believe in the testimony of Genesis to understand Noah’s shock. Isn’t that how the world goes, disappearing before our very eyes? The play was last performed in 1576. How many trees had survived since then, how many carts and castles and ploughs? Probably not a single oak in the whole vast Weald, though their lives make man seem puny. They had been swept up by that silent, shiftless flood which swirls perpetually across this world. In time it would obliterate everything in sight, for forms rise but briefly and collapse no matter how solid they look.

In this landscape of erasure, one plant stood out as an anomaly, a living fossil. The horsetail that choked every half-damp ditch I passed had been here when the Weald was still a tropical swamp, long before the chalky Downs were formed. If a nuclear winter ever comes to pass it’s the horsetail I’ll put my money on, rising stiff-fronded through the dust and rubble as it has for the last 230 million years.
Equisetum
, as it is properly known, is the living link between our own age and that of the dinosaurs. Cows trample it now, but it was growing here when the Weald was home to the iguanodon
,
one of the first dinosaurs to be discovered.

The earliest traces of the iguanodon were found at the beginning of the nineteenth century by the obstetrician and geologist Gideon Mantell, just over a mile from where I now stood. In this period neither the concept nor the word
dinosaur
existed and even the idea that life forms might become extinct was new and barely tolerated. Geology, as I have said, was an emerging discipline, and in the rush to find and date the layers of rock that comprised the planet’s crust, a number of mysterious fossils were being unearthed and, for the first time, systematically classified. The categorisation of early mammals was fairly easy, but stranger and more ambiguous remains were also being discovered. In 1811, on the coast of Lyme Regis, the fossil-hunter Mary Anning had found the skeleton of a previously unknown marine reptile. It was named, after some considerable debate, the ichthyosaur, and over the next ten years various papers were published describing its anatomy and provenance. The discovery caused ripples of intense excitement in the scientific establishment on both sides of the Channel. What was this strange creature, which didn’t look like anything so far found in the sea? How old was it? And if it really was extinct, why had God created it only to let it drop out of existence?

Like Anning, Mantell was fascinated by fossils and the secret history they seemed to encode. Originally a shoemaker’s son from Lewes, he worked by necessity as a country doctor, pursuing his interest in geology between delivering the town’s babies. His father had not been able to afford to send him to university, and the poverty of his background bothered him intensely. The Mantells had once been noble, and like many poor and clever children, Gideon dreamed of restoring his family name. He’d been collecting fossils since childhood; the first, an ammonite, he found just beneath the surface of one of the streams that fed the Ouse.

In the undulating landscape around Lewes Mantell carried out his earliest explorations, turning up the belemnites and bivalves that betrayed the chalk’s origins on the bed of an ancient ocean. In 1816 he married, and after that he shifted his investigations north, focusing particularly on a patch of the Weald about ten miles shy of Lewes. The ground here was sandstone, and the fossils it contained were very different from the marine remains he’d become accustomed to unearthing. When his preliminary excavations at Whiteman’s Green quarry revealed large bones of a kind he’d never seen before, Mantell tipped off a quarryman and was soon receiving packages of random body parts: disarticulated forms that arrived sometimes individually and sometimes as a mass embedded in rock. He worked on them by night after his doctor’s rounds were finished, teasing the bones free with a chisel in the drawing room at Castle Place, the beautiful townhouse he’d bought beneath the castle.

The sheer size of the bones was baffling. Mantell thought at first they might belong to an ichthyosaur, but he was disabused of this notion when he began to notice that some of the rocks from Whiteman’s Green contained traces of tropical vegetation: feathery fronds that resembled palms and tree ferns; prints of leaves that looked strangely like euphorbias, which grew in Asia and were not native to these islands. If the strata he was investigating had, as he suspected, once lain beneath a now eroded layer of chalk, then it seemed he had stumbled upon the remains of a tropical world, submerged at some unguessable period by a sea that had itself long since receded. This made the size of the bones all the more intriguing. By the early nineteenth century fossils of giant mammals were regularly being found in Europe, among them mammoths, mastodons and some sort of ancestor of the elephant. But these were always found in Tertiary rock, whereas Mantell was almost certain his bones came from a deeper and correspondingly far older layer. Ancient crocodiles had also been unearthed on the coast of France, and this had begun to seem the likeliest source for the bones when Mary Ann Mantell, Gideon’s wife, stumbled across something strange.

Mantell left several written versions of this story, none of which quite tally in detail or date. What seems clear is that at some point in 1820 or 1821, his wife came across a giant tooth – perhaps more than one – on the road near Whiteman’s Green, where it lay amid some stones recently hauled from the quarry. This tooth, which Mantell sometimes claimed he’d found himself, was the key to the bone puzzle, though it would take some four or five years to properly decode. More were soon found, and close inspection immediately ruled out the possibility that they’d derived from any sort of crocodile. They clearly belonged to a herbivore, being designed for grinding and much eroded by use. Even in their worn state they were huge: up to 1.4 inches long and, in Mantell’s own words, ‘so remarkable that the most superficial observer would have been struck with their appearance as something novel and interesting’. If they weren’t from a mammal or a fish, what else could they be? The thought perplexed him, and at last, very tentatively, he began to draw the only remaining conclusion: some giant, hitherto unguessed-at member of the lizard tribe.

When I think of Mantell’s work, I am reminded of a type of story common to both Greek myths and the folk tales of northern Europe, in which the hero must attempt to sort a mass of dirt and poppy seeds or separate mixed grains into their constituent parts. These labours are usually accomplished with magical help, and they occur, to give a pair of examples, in the tale of Eros and Psyche and in some of the overlapping yarns that are spun around the Russian witch Baba Yaga. I mention these myths because I think they are helpful in imagining the impossibility of the task Mantell set himself when he began to piece together from a rubble of broken and disparate bones an animal whose very existence was only just short of unimaginable.

Convincing the scientific establishment of the significance of his find was never going to be easy. Mantell was a country doctor; despite his evident brilliance he was not immediately welcomed into academic circles, and though he built up many sustaining friendships with geologists, he was also so peculiarly unlucky he sometimes felt himself quite sincerely to be cursed. In 1822 he published a book about his finds in the Weald that to his gratification was ordered four times over by the king, George IV. But despite its success, the book was not enough to get his suspicions about the giant lizard accepted. For this he needed the validation of the Geological Society, but its members rejected Mantell’s thesis, suggesting politely that he must have been mistaken about the age of the rock in which the bones were found.

The next summer a friend took the tooth across the Channel to show it to the great French naturalist Georges Cuvier, but he too was dismissive, announcing that it must have derived from some sort of rhinoceros. On the verge of total despair, Mantell resolved to focus his efforts on proving the rock quarried at Whiteman’s Green was indeed from a Secondary strata, and thus considerably older than the Tertiary rock in which mammalian remains were customarily discovered.

Two things changed his fortunes. Among the mess of bones that had been hauled from Whiteman’s Green were other teeth, equally large but with a tearing surface that was instantly declarative of a carnivore. Mantell wasn’t the only person to have discovered such relics. The geologist William Buckland had in his possession the partial skeleton of a massive animal found near Oxford, which, as luck would have it, was unmistakably of reptilian origin. The story of the Oxford lizard is as complex in its way as that of the iguanodon, but it is sufficient for our purposes to say that in 1824 Buckland announced his discovery of megalosaurus, the first land dinosaur – though that word had still not been invented – to be officially identified. Mantell was present at this meeting of the Geological Society and, screwing up his courage, stood to announce the carnivorous teeth he’d also discovered in the Weald. Buckland agreed to visit him in Lewes, and there conceded that the teeth did belong to megalosaurus, which he thought – wrongly, as it turned out – might turn out to ‘have equalled in height our largest elephant and in length fallen little short of the largest whale’.

The world was rapidly shifting towards an acceptance of Mantell’s theory, and a few weeks after the meeting in which the megalosaurus was unveiled, Cuvier finally agreed that the giant herbivorous teeth were indeed reptilian in origin. Mantell was intensely gratified, and soon after came almost by chance upon the conclusive evidence he’d so long sought. Early that autumn he spent a day at the Royal College of Surgeons, searching through the Hunterian Museum’s vast reserve of anatomical specimens to see if he could find a reptilian tooth that bore even a vague resemblance to his find. The work was dispiriting, and he was about to give it up when the assistant curator, Samuel Stutchbury, came ambling over for a chat. Stutchbury, it transpired, was familiar with tropical reptiles from having worked sporadically at cataloguing the specimens that slave ships sometimes deposited in Bristol, and he immediately saw a startling similarity between Mantell’s tooth and that of the iguana, despite the unholy disparity in size. An iguana is about three feet long; scaling up, Mantell calculated rapidly, might make his own creature a mighty sixty feet.

In 1825, Mantell’s paper on the giant lizard – now named
Iguanodon mantelli
, from the Greek for ‘iguana tooth’ – was read out to the Royal Society. By the end of the year, he was formally invited to become a Fellow. It was probably the happiest moment of his life, and heralded a period of unprecedented professional acclaim. Mantell began to lecture widely on the dinosaurs and their realm, bringing the lost world to life with such passion that his audiences were by all accounts spellbound.

He was still avidly collecting fossils, and in 1834 a find confirmed his earliest instincts about the iguanodon. The Maid-stone slab, as it became known, was a huge lump of rock unearthed from a quarry in Kent. Embedded in it were a great variety of guddled bones, some broken and some incomplete, which Mantell instantly recognised as belonging to one or more iguanodons. This find was complete enough to allow him for the first time to make a proper guess at the creature’s form, assembling what looked in his initial drawing of it something like a large reptilian dog, around thirty feet long, with a coiling tail and a spike parked on its snout. In time it became apparent to him that the fore-limbs were shorter and more delicate than the hind, and could be used for plucking foliage, though in this as in much else he was contradicted by his bitter rival, the creationist Richard Owen, curator of the British Museum, who coined the word
dinosaur
and attempted to take credit for the discovery of the iguanodon.

This fortunate period in Mantell’s career wasn’t destined to last for long. The medical practice he established in Brighton in 1833 almost bankrupted him, and while the town council saved him temporarily by buying up the premises for use as a museum, he made such a botch of this as a financial venture that his wife Mary Ann, who had illustrated his books with her own drawings, left him, taking their four children with her. A little later Mantell’s beloved daughter died, and between these two nightmarish events he became so seriously short of funds that the vast collection of fossils he’d assembled since childhood had to be sold in its entirety to the British Museum. The crowning insult came in 1841, when, living alone in Clapham, Mantell was injured in a carriage accident that permanently damaged his spine. He survived for just over a decade, still working almost daily despite the increasing pain, and died at the last in the winter of 1852, accidentally overdosing on the opium he’d begun to take liberally in the wake of his injury.