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MANTELL, GIDEON ALGERNON (b. Lewes, Sussex,
England, 3 February 1790; d. London, England,
10 November 1852), geology.
In 1835 he was the second recipient of its high honor,
the Wollaston Medal (the first was William Smith).
Mantell was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in
1825 and he received a Royal Medal in 1849.
Mantell's first and most important book was The
Fossils of the South Downs, or Illustrations of the Geology
of Sussex (1822), a large quarto volume with forty-two
lithographic plates. It is now known chiefly for the
large number of fossils (nearly all invertebrates) from
the Cretaceous and Tertiary strata, but particularly
from the Chalk, that Mantell described and illustrated.
Many were new species, named by him and now
familiar. The most notable fossil here fully described
for the first time and named by him is the sponge
Ventriculites. He wrote various papers on other Chalk
fossils, particularly on belemnites and the microscopic
organisms found in flint nodules. Mantell included a
colored geological map that is on a larger scale and is
more detailed and accurate than existing maps of the
district (the parts of the general maps of England and
Wales by William Smith, 1815, and Greenough, 1819),
although the succession of the Cretaceous strata below
the Chalk was not satisfactorily settled until 1824, by
W. H. Fitton and T. Webster.
An important advance in the knowledge of the geology
of northwestern Europe was the recognition of the
freshwater origin of the Wealden series of the Cretaceous
together with the uppermost series of the Jurassic
(Purbeckian). This suggestion was first made by
Conybeare in Outlines of the Geology of England and
Wales (1822), in which he looks forward to support
by the forthcoming “work of Mr. Mantell on the
fossils of Sussex.” Mantell, however, following a
warning by George Sowerby on some of his fossil
shells from the Wealden, deprecates rather than confirms
the inference of a freshwater origin. In a letter
to Webster of November 1822 Fitton gave his opinion
that the whole of the Purbeck-Wealden series was
freshwater, and he published this opinion in Annals
of Philosophy (1824). Thus, it cannot be said that
Mantell was the first to establish the freshwater origin
of the Wealden beds, as has been stated, although the
evidence he had already obtained (1822), and particularly
the evidence he later obtained, did in fact support
it, as he came to realize.
Mantell is best known for his discovery of the first
dinosaur ever to be described properly--a momentous
event. During the second and third decades of the
nineteenth century remains of aquatic saurians had
been found and described in Britain by several leading
geologists, particularly by Conybeare and Buckland,
and in France by Cuvier, the founder of vertebrate
paleontology. But the existence of the great land
saurians (named Dinosauria by Richard Owen in
1842) had not even been suspected. Their enormous
diversity is now known in great detail, and the extent
of their dominance of life during the entire Mesozoic
is fully realized. Fossils that were clearly teeth but
unlike any known fossil teeth were found in 1822 by
Mantell (it was Mrs. Mantell who first noticed them in
a pile of stones along the roadside) together with some
loosely scattered bones. In 1825 he was shown teeth
of the modern lizard iguana, and he saw that his
fossil teeth were similar but much larger. Mantell
described the fossil teeth in a paper to the Royal
Society in that year and called the large herbivorous
reptile to which they must have belonged Iguanodon.
Although bones that could definitely be shown to
have belonged to the same animal had not been found,
such associations came to light in 1835 in various
parts of the Wealden formation of southern England.
The fossils were studied by Richard Owen, and
Iguanodon was reconstructed in a life-size model
(together with models of other dinosaurs) in the
grounds of the Crystal Palace in south London in
1854. By a curious mistake the reptile was reconstructed
with a horned nose, but the bone thus placed
was later found to be a large spike at the end of this
biped's “thumb.”
In 1832 Mantell discovered the first strongly armored
group of dinosaurs. He described this fossil,
which he named Hylaeosaurus, in The Geology of the
South-east of England (1833). Like the Iguanodon,
Hylaeosaurus was discovered in the Tilgate Forest
region of northern Sussex. Meanwhile, Buckland in
1824 had described the remains of the large carnivorous
dinosaur Megalosaurus from the Jurassic near
Oxford. Thus the first three dinosaurs to be known,
the Iguanodon, the Megalosaurus, and the Hylaeosaurus,
each belonged to a quite distinct group, later
called Ornithopoda, Theropoda, and Ankylosauria,
respectively. Although Mantell may be said to have
been essentially an amateur collector and expounder--although
a very expert and extraordinarily industrious
one--he was professionally qualified to examine and
report on matters of vertebrate paleontology by
reason of his anatomical knowledge as a surgeon.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
I. ORIGINAL WORKS.
Mantell's papers are listed in
Royal Society Catalogue of Scientific Papers, IV, 219-220.
His chief works are The Fossils of the South Downs, or
Illustrations of the Geology of Sussex (London, 1822); “On
the Teeth of the Iguanodon, a Newly-discovered Fossil
Herbivorous Reptile,” in Philosophical Transactions of the
Royal Society, 115 (1825), 179-186; Illustrations of the
Geology of Sussex (London, 1827); The Geology of the
South-east of England (London, 1833); The Wonders of