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Dinosaurs are big, fierce and extinct. As one of the most familar faces
of science, they have become stars of books, films and theme parks. Their
incredible and enduring popularity has made them scientific and commercial
moneyspinners. They grace our breakfast tables on or in packets of cereal,
they fill toy shops and even star in their own television soap opera. Scientists,
too, are fascinated by these extinct giants. Research on dinosaurs considers
such questions as how they moved and whether they were warm or cold-blooded.
Could creatures often far bigger than elephants run? What colour were they?
Dinosaurs also star in the debate about the causes of extinctions at the
Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary. There are now more than 800 books in print
featuring dinosaurs, in English alone. And new books, good and bad, continue
to appear.

These ‘terrible lizards’ have attracted attention for 150 years, since
the British anatomist and palaeontologist Richard Owen invented the name.
He had worked extensively on the anatomy of living animals, with a newly
developed interest in fossils from Jurassic and Cretaceous rocks of southern
England. Owen is said to have named the dinosaurs one day in 1841, during
a lecture on fossil reptiles given to a meeting of the British Association
for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) in Plymouth. Last year, the date was
variously celebrated as 30 July, 2 August or 24 August, with a television
series, the publication of special books, exhibitions and even anniversary
postage stamps. The dinosaur ‘birthdays’ attracted a lot of publicity; in
particular, the BAAS returned to Plymouth for its annual meeting. But these
claims for the 1991 anniversary were overhasty; the newspapers and magazines
of the day show that Owen did not make this bold step until April 1842,
150 years ago this week.

Fossil evidence

Owen’s ideas arose from a series of spectacular fossil discoveries made
between 1790 and 1830. The collector Mary Anning and her family had found
fossils of marine and flying reptiles in the rocks around Lyme Regis in
Dorset. And two separate genera of apparently enormous animals that had
once lived on land had been discovered and widely publicised: one by the
clerical academic William Buckland, in Oxfordshire, and one in Sussex by
the surgeon and amateur scientist Gideon Mantell.

There was no doubt that some of these monstrous fossils were ancient,
thanks to the work of geologist William Smith, formerly an engineer on the
canals. Smith’s observations of the layers of younger rock lying on top
of the old led him to establish the principles of stratigraphy, proving
the antiquity of the Oxfordshire specimens, which had been found in mines.
Mantell’s material in Sussex came from a much less certain horizon and provoked
considerable debate at first over its true age; some people thought that
the Sussex specimens were very recent by comparison with Buckland’s Oxfordshire
samples.

But although stratigraphic data was available, Britain in the 1820s
lacked a good comparative anatomist. So France was to provide the expertise
needed to decipher what sort of creature left these bones, through the work
of Georges Cuvier. He was one of the first scientists to demonstrate that
extinction had happened often in the fossil record. Cuvier had visited England
in 1817 and 1818, when he had seen many of the early discoveries, but he
died in 1832. A power struggle then developed about who should inherit his
scientific mantle in England.

Battle lines were drawn up particularly between Mantell, the provincial
amateur, and Owen, the well-paid professional working in London. As well
as being part of the metropolitan establishment, Owen was nearly a generation
younger than Mantell. Owen had another adversary in the scientific battle
over the origin of these fossils. Robert Grant was the poorly paid professor
of comparative anatomy and zoology at London’s University College, known
as the ‘Godless college’. Grant lived up to his institution’s reputation
by championing evolution as a means of producing the varied character of
fossils.

Dinosaurs became weapons in the battle between this trinity, which encompassed
the growing ideological warfare of the time between theories of evolution
and religious belief in acts of creation. The debate might have raged in
scientific seclusion had it not been for the growing public interest in
science. Newspapers had been part of British life for a long time. By 1841,
improvements in printing technology and paper manufacture meant that newspapers
and magazines were becoming both cheaper and more common. And better education
meant that more people could read. The decade of political frenzy that accompanied
the Reform Acts of 1831 and 1832 fostered an increasing interest in science.
Debates developed on such themes as ‘The decline of science in England’
and whether the Royal Society in London had too dominant a role in leading
English science. The computer pioneer Charles Babbage played an active part
in leading these debates. The BAAS came into existence in 1831 as a rival
to the Royal Society, but it differed by being both itinerant and provincial.

Divine inspiration

In these early decades of the 19th century, science gained a place in
popular debate, helped especially by the Penny Magazine and the Penny Cyclopaedia.
When the Cyclopaedia started in 1833, 75 000 copies of each issue were printed,
priced at a penny. Geology was at the heart of many of the popular debates.
The age of the Earth came under scrutiny as scientists began to move away
from a version of history taken literally from the Bible. The fossils that
collectors such as Mantell had gathered inspired further debates over whether
species had evolved or were the results of separate acts of divine creation.

The BAAS supported the young Swiss naturalist Louis Agassiz with his
work on fossil fish, with grants in 1835 and 1837. But leading lights in
the BAAS saw it as a slight to British science that native fossil treasures
were being revealed by foreigners. In 1837, they decided also to ask Owen
to undertake a similar commission on the fossil reptiles of Britain. In
1838 the BAAS granted him £200 to further his fossil research. The
three – man committee which supervised this research fund helpfully included
his father-in-law.

Owen was a rising star at the Royal College of Surgeons and St Bartholomew’s
Hospital in London. The BAAS, with its foundations in provincial science,
had chosen to support the metropolitan Owen, while the Royal Society was
encouraging Mantell, the amateur from the provinces. And Grant, the third
researcher in the field, had to make do with what little he could earn from
teaching. Owen’s first report, on fossil marine reptiles, was read to the
BAAS in August 1839, and it was soon declared to be the work of an English
Cuvier – a title earlier bestowed on Grant by medical journals. On 2 August
1841 Owen gave his famous lecture to the BAAS at Plymouth on the rest of
the fossil reptiles – the land-dwellers.

Newspapers were divided about what interest such science might have
for their readers. The Times, long unenthusiastic about the BAAS, simply
reported that Owen’s lecture was ‘very long’. Others were more interested.
We have a very clear account of what Owen actually said at Plymouth, from
three local Plymouth newspapers as well as the Athenaeum and the Literary
Gazette, and reports published in France, Germany and the US. All eight
reports make no mention of dinosaurs; they show instead that at that time
Owen grouped the three main types of fossils found, Iguanodon, Megalosaurus
and Hylaeosaurus, with lizards within the Lacertian or Squamate division
of the Saurian order, in the class Reptilia.

Taxonomy is an inclusive science: any statement that Iguanodon and friends
belonged in one category means that they are automatically excluded from
any other of equal rank. Not only did Owen not mention dinosaurs at Plymouth
in 1841, he had not yet invented any such category. It is thanks to the
Victorian journalists who reported Owen’s lecture so accurately that this
critical scientific nuance is clear.

It is also clear from the contemporary reports that Owen believed at
the time that the largest Iguanodon was up to six times the size of the
largest elephant – making it as much as 200 feet long. This estimate of
their size agreed with an earlier interpretation made by Mantell; at the
time, both saw these lizards as truly gigantic beasts.

Owen also asserted in his lecture that he did not believe in the gradation
or evolutionary passage of one form of fossil reptile into another. Each
of the groups were, he said, ‘distinct instances of Creative Power, living
proofs of a divine will and the works of a divine hand, ever superintending
and ruling the existence of our world’. Owen was throwing down the anti-evolution
gauntlet, the first stage of an argument he would later take up against
Charles Darwin.

After the Plymouth meeting, Owen spent some time in the West Country,
returning to London in September. He then settled down to work on his book
on odontography, as well as gathering data for a new report on British fossil
mammals, commissioned by the BAAS. A letter he wrote from Cambridge late
in December 1841 records that he intended to return to London the following
week to finish his revision of the report on the reptiles. The revisions
were significant. On 14 January 1842, Owen’s best friend William J. Broderip
reported to William Buckland: ‘I have now before me the beginnings of the
end of Owen’s Report on fossil reptiles . . . he has reduced the sesquipedality
of some of your old friends (Iguanodon and so on) with tails as long as
St Martin’s Steeple’. Broderip was referring to the church of St Martin-in-the-Fields
in London, with a tower 192 feet high. The letter is proof that Owen had
completely revised his ideas about the size of Iguanodon after his Plymouth
lecture.

Owen came to recognise dinosaurs as a new order from his study of comparative
anatomy. He discovered that particular vertebrae, called the sacral vertebrae,
were fused together in Iguanadon, just as they were already known to be
in the genus Megalosaurus. Owen took this fusion, which strengthened the
sacral vertebrae, as the key adaption that the dinosaurs made to terrestrial
life. Once Owen found an Iguanodon specimen with this new characteristic,
which he described as ‘altogether peculiar among reptiles’, he could justify
erecting a new order, the dinosaurs. He derived the name from Greek, meaning
‘terrible lizard’.

The piece of evidence that convinced Owen was a fossil held in a museum
in the City of London owned by the London wine merchant William Devonshire
Saull. The museum had opened in 1833. Saull was a socialist who believed
firmly in education, to the extent that his museum was open to all, even
to the working classes, every Thursday. Owen, a member of the Anglican Tory
establishment, must have been chagrined to find this vital specimen, ‘on
which the characters of the order Dinosauria were mainly founded’ as he
later described it, in the hands of a socialist radical. The vital specimen
came from the Isle of Wight, and still survives as a truly historic object.

So it was in the final version of his report on British reptiles, published
by the BAAS in London in April 1842, eight months after the Plymouth meeting,
that Owen at last invented the dinosaurs. In the report he made a strikingly
original assessment of the relationship between three different and fragmentary
genera of fossil reptiles (the familiar Iguanodon, Megalosaurus and Hylaeosaurus),
placing them for the first time in the new order or suborder Dinosauria.
Owen’s ideas continued to evolve through the final stages of preparation
of the report; the printer’s records survive to demonstrate how many changes
Owen made to the proofs during printing.

The invention of the dinosaurs was a highly political act, as is made
clear in Adrian Desmond’s fine book The Politics of Evolution. The creatures
of Owen’s new order were large, but no longer gigantic; Megalosaurus and
Iguanodon had both been cut down to about 30 feet long, from the original
estimate of 200 feet. Owen saw dinosaurs as four-footed reptiles, similar
to present pachyderm mammals such as elephants. Such reptiles seemed to
him to disprove the arguments of those who favoured progressive evolution,
because God had clearly given these extinct reptiles the characteristics
of advanced mammals at their creation. Owen took dinosaurs as a weapon in
his battle with Grant, who believed that evolution explained these variations
in fossil form. Owen’s scaling down of the size of the creatures was a similar
strike against his second rival, Mantell, who stuck closer to his original
estimates of their size.

To researchers working today eight months may seem a trivial delay between
speaking at a scientific meeting and seeing the finished product in print.
But dinosaurs have a show-business quality that makes anything about them
news. The 150th anniversary of their baptism made headlines last year. But
Owen said nothing in Plymouth in 1841 on the subject of dinosaurs. His lecture
there bore no relation to the report he published in London the following
year as far as dinosaurs were concerned. It seems especially strange that
such an error should creep into the recent history of a group of animals
that died out some 65 million years ago. But there are lessons to be learnt
from the episode. The first concerns the fine quality of the journalism
that recorded Owen’s Plymouth lecture in sufficient detail to trace the
development of his ideas today. Secondly, the story illustrates how varied
an interest the media took in science even 150 years ago. Punch attended
the Plymouth meeting, the first BAAS meeting in its lifetime, but came away
with little about the science.

A day on the water, by way of excursion A night at the play-house, by
way of diversion, A morning assemblage of elegant ladies, A chemical lecture
on lemon and kalis, A magnificent dinner – the venison so tender – Lots
of wine, broken glasses – that’s all I remember

Much of the press was far less good-humoured, and some not in favour
of science at all. The West of England Conservative newspaper definitely
did not believe in any advancement of science. In its 4 August 1841 issue,
the paper ‘opposed the almost general expectation that men would be made
wise by the fertilising overflow of science’. Lest its position should be
misunderstood, the same publication asserted ‘we have not attempted to give
reports of the sectional meetings (the scene of Owen’s lecture) because
we should generally be publishing that which our readers would not understand’.

This argument has a familiar ring today, even after a century and a
half of a ‘fertilising overflow’. Science is still considered too difficult
and obscure to interest people other than scientists. This is particularly
sad at a time when scientists are under pressure to demonstrate the value
of their work, if only in terms of the wealth it creates. Owen could have
had no idea of the wealth to be made from his invention in 1842. A new order
of reptiles sounds a most unlikely source of riches, scientific or otherwise.

Science rarely generates packed public meetings, leading articles or
heated arguments conducted in the columns of major newspapers. The exceptions,
such as the cold fusion debate, often attract publicity for reasons others
than their science. But compare this with the attention given to architecture,
opera and the arts in general. Science plays too small a part in our cultural
life. Few politicians have any scientific training; Britain has a minister
for the arts, but where is his scientific counterpart?

The true dinosaur birthday this month will be an occasion for muted
celebration. There will be a dinosaur display at the Natural History Museum
in London, a few public lectures in universities and museums, and a special
issue of dinosaur stamps in Canada, but no other recognition of Owen’s bold
move to identify the dinosaurs as a separate group of creatures and score
against two of his main scientific rivals.

August 1991 saw extensive publicity for the anniversary meeting of the
BAAS in Plymouth. Commemorative postage stamps appeared with a fanfare of
publicity, and were commended for their potential for spreading interest
in science. It is sad that this effort was based on flawed history. Although
there is only a small difference between the two dates, an error of eight
months in 149 years on the basis of a good historical record raises questions
about how researchers deal with the far older and less precise fossil record.

In a wider sense, the dinosaur debate raises the question of why scientists
turn historian far more frequently than historians turn scientist. The rigour
of both disciplines is equal and science should not marginalise history
as it too often does. After 150 years the separate cultures of the arts
and the sciences need to fuse together, as the sacral vertebrae at the crux
of Owen’s argument did.

Hugh Torrens is a historian and geologist at the University of Keele.

Further reading: The politics of Evolution, by Adrian Desmond, University
of Chicago Press (1989).