Gideon Mantell: Encyclopedia II - Gideon Mantell - Giant iguana-like teeth

Gideon Mantell - Giant iguana-like teeth

Gideon Mantell was born in Lewes, Sussex. He 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. Inspired by the sensational discovery of a fossilised animal resembling a huge crocodile (later identified as an ichthyosaur) by Mary Anning at Lyme Regis in Dorset, Mantell became passionately interested in the study of the fossilised animals and plants which were being found in the 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 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 or Illustrations of the Geology of Sussex), 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.

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. Mantell was 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 sixty feet (eighteen meters) in length.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Giant iguana-like teeth", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki