Dinosaurs, egos and madness

THE DINOSAUR HUNTERS: A True Story of Scientific Rivalry and the Discovery of the Prehistoric World by Deborah Cadbury (Fourth Estate, 15.99)

WHAT is there in bones that can make men mad? There seems to have been a curse upon the bones of dinosaurs that drove their first discoverers to distraction.

Perhaps it was the recognition of a world so remote and lurid that it seemed to have more in common with feverish, medieval visions of hell - peopled with Hieronymus Bosch's hybrid zoology - than with the proprieties of Victorian society.

Almost all of the early authorities on the giant reptiles of the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods became ill or peculiar, and one of the greatest, Dean Buckland, became clinically insane. Dinosaurs stimulated perversions of the ego as massive as their improbable thighs.

The remains of the vanished world of the Jurassic were discovered as early as 1811 in the cliffs of Lyme Regis in Dorset. The finders were members of the Anning family, and the daughter, Mary Anning, subsequently uncovered the most remarkable array of "sea lizards", Ichthyosaurus, several of which can still be admired in their mounts on the walls of the the Natural History Museum in London. Nowadays, children saunter by these extraordinary creatures as if an ice-cream were more interesting, but when they were discovered they caused a sensation.

Like several of the pioneering finders of fossils, Mary Anning was from humble origins. Her life was dogged by debt and tragedy as plaintive as that of any Dickens character.

RICHARD FORTEY Towards the end of her life, embittered and suffering from terminal breast cancer, she still laboured on the beach at Lyme Regis making new discoveries: she was the first victim of the curse of the bones. For all their singularity, Anning's sea reptiles were not dinosaurs. Deborah Cadbury's riveting story of these great terrestrial behemoths identifies the hero of the tale as a Sussex doctor, Gideon Mantell, who sacrificed both health and marriage in pursuit of a Cretaceous dream. Step by step, Cadbury reconstructs Mantell's obsessive deductions, made from fragments and scraps of bones, leading inevitably towards an appreciation that there was once a world dominated by reptiles. We accept this with insouciance now, but in the early 19th century Mantell had to fight for every insight against a sceptical scientific establishment that resented an amateur fooling around with something that might challenge the biblical narrative of creation.

Mantell's older contemporary, the charismatic and successful Dean William Buckland of Oxford University, even left a mighty dinosaur undescribed for years as he followed the scent of geological proofs of the biblical flood.

Mantell ploughed a lonely furrow, ever mindful of a fame that should have been his, mortgaging his future against a noble patronage that eluded him. He developed an ulcerated and twisted spine, but struggled on, dosed on laudanum, to forge his vision of the past for science.

He died in pain. His body was deposited in the Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons to illustrate human deformity: his own cursed bones preserved.

Almost all Mantell's scientific observations have been vindicated by modern studies.

But Mantell was cheated of his share of fame by the most illustrious comparative anatomist of the age, Richard Owen. There is no question of Owen's brilliance. He, too, worked his way to dominance from somewhat obscure beginnings, ambitious and ingenious by turns. It was Owen who coined the term "dinosaur" to describe the terrestrial reptiles whose significance was just being recognised. By the time of the Great Exhibition at Crystal Palace in 1851 it was Owen, not Mantell, who dominated the scientific firmament. He was decorated with every conceivable honour; he established the Natural History Museum as his memorial.

But he was touched with a colossal arrogance commensurate with the dinosaurs he named, which led him to downgrade the importance of his imagined rivals. His central "establishment" role led to his own form of ruin. He was forced to take a stand against Darwin: TH Huxley roasted him thoroughly on the coals of his

own theocentrism. Owen, too, finished his days haunted by a sense of what might have been.

Deborah Cadbury tells the extraordinary story of the dinosaur hunters extraordinarily well. I can only quibble with her spelling of Sedgwick (it's not Sedgewick). No other narrative I know illustrates the human element in scientific discovery quite so dramatically.

lRichard Fortey is professor of palaeontology at the Natural History Museum and the author of Life: An Unauthorised Biography (Flamingo) and Trilobite: Eyewitness to Evolution (HarperCollins).

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