Introduction

In these days of complexity theory it is difficult to say, with any conviction, how things could have turned out better for Gideon Algernon Mantell. Where he had been educated informally, almost all of his associates were Oxbridge men. Where he had to work grueling hours to support his family, most of his colleagues were in reciept of a private income, freeing them from the distractions of employment. Where Mantell was married to a disapproving wife, many of his more successful contemporaries were either single or recieved unstinting support from their spouses. Had things been different, his name would be well known, or at least as well known as any other 19th century proto-palaeontologist. But the burden of contingency doesn't lie with Gideon Mantell alone. It has to be shared by a large animal dying under certain conditions during the Valanginian age of the early Cretaceous, some 132 million years earlier.

Parents and Youth

Gideon Algernon Mantell was born in Lewes, East Sussex (UK), to Thomas and Sarah Mantell in 1790. Very little is known about Sarah. It must be assumed that she spent the larger part of her time nursing the seven children she would bear. Of Gideon's father, Thomas, a little more is known. He is always quoted as being a cobbler, or boot-maker. However, according to the will of a contemporary Lewes resident, Mary Cornwell, Thomas is described as a 'cordwainer', or maker of cord. It is entirely possible that he persued both careers, as Lewes is built on either side of the Ouse, a busy and important waterway in the days of the Mantells. He was a non-conformist Methodist and, it seems, a bit of a revolutionary, frequenting the same watering-holes as Thomas Paine¹, the man behind both the French and American revolutions. Paine's Headstrong Club met at the White Hart² in Lewes High Street, a few minutes walk from the Mantell's home. This may seem unimportant, but Thomas Mantell's religious and social stance effectively barred his son's acceptance at the local Anglican grammar school. This, amongst other impediments, was to prove an insurmountable barrier to his son's later ambitions.

Education

Mantell's education was a hotch-potch affair. Although equipped with a good memory and an alert mind, formal channels of education were closed to him. He attended a 'Dame's school' in St.Mary's lane, Lewes, which was run by a single old 'dame' from her front parlour. She grew fond of Gideon, and on her death left him everything. Following this, his father then sent him to the school of a known dissenter, Mr. John Button. After a couple of years he moved on again, to another school of dissenters outside Swindon, run by Gideon's uncle, a Baptist minister. When Gideon returned from this final stint at school, he was apprenticed to James Moore, a Lewes surgeon.

It is unclear precisely what the body of his education consisted of, but the adult Gideon Mantell was a man of good grace and fortitude. He was devoted to his family, yet also consumed with a passion for reptiles that had long ceased to breathe. This was a passion he had discovered for himself as a child. Roaming around Lewes, he spent time in the numerous chalk quarries, unearthing ammonites, bivalves and corals. These had all lived in the shallow tropical sea that had been home to the billions of radiolarians that had died, drifted to the sea floor, and built up into layers to form the chalk downland of his child-hood landscape.

The Tooth

If Mantell had not married Mary Woodhouse in May, 1816, it is unlikely that his name would be remembered at all. She was 20 when they met, and initially she was interested in fossils as well. She hunted with him, and drew the illustrations to his descriptions. The young Mantell could not have selected a more perfect partner. By this time Mantell was a full partner in James Moore's surgery. He worled extremely long hours, and devoted his spare time to adding to his fossil collection. This was already growing rapidly, as various corespondents were sending him specimens by the box-full.

Although the hours and work-load of his job were stressful, the mode of travel during the 1800's forced Mantell into some serene moments with his new wife. Frequently Mary would accompany Gideon in his horse and trap around the chalk lanes of East Sussex, as he visited patients too ill to travel. One one such occasion, Gideon was visiting a patient in Ringmer, (a few miles outside of Lewes) while Mary spent her time outside, perusing the sandstone rocks of the newly laid road. She noticed an unusual feature of one bit of sandstone - a darkness...there was something else in there she didn't quite recognise. Had she hurled this rock over the hedge-row, or simply dropped it back to the ground, the course of their lives may have been very different. As it was she showed Gideon when he emerged from the patient's house.

Gideon was fascinated - it looked like a tooth, but he'd have to get it home and prepare it before he could make a formal identification. If he couldn't identify it, one of his corespendents almost certainly could. But Mantell did identify it. He identified it as the tooth of an herbivorous reptile. He named the creature from which it came Iguanadon, literally 'Iguana tooth'.

Tribulations

The sandstone used to surface the Ringmer road was quarried from Tilgate forest, near Cuckfield, about 12 miles from Lewes. The instant Mantell recognised the find as something special, he travelled to the quarry, and let the workers know that anything unusual turning up in the sandstone would earn them a reward.

It was during this time that Gideon began to fill his house with fossils and children. Forced to compete with long-dead animals for space, Mary grew understandably short with Gideon. Such was the pressure that Mantell bought the house next door and knocked them into one to provide more room. This initally pleased Mary, until Gideon predictably filled it up with fossils. Mary must have recieved a taste of what her future life might be like during this period. Gideon was always busy with patients, delivering up to 300 babies a year, as well as attending injuries and a whole variety of poxes and diseases. His spare time was taken up with the study of rocks, and the front parlour, a place normally reserved only for polite company, had turned into a public museum. It is no wonder that she was growing increasingly impatient with the man.

The man, however, was becoming increasingly fascinated by the Iguanadon's tooth, and the geology of Britain. The tooth had been named because in those days it was common, when dealing with an unidentified fossil, to compare it with a modern analogue, hence the comparison with iguana. It looked like an iguana tooth, so it must have come from something thta looked like an iguana. It was much bigger however, so Mantell followed the accepted course of wisdom and scaled up the size of the mystery animal accordingly. What he ended up with was a lizard of ridiculous proportions. Confused, he sent the find to the most eminent palaeontologist/anatomist of the time - Baron Cuvier, a Frenchman stationed at the Museum National d'Histoire Naturelle, Paris. A devasted Mantell was informed by Cuvier that it was nothing more than the tooth of an extinct rhinoceros. Undeterred, Mantell continued to believe he had found something of great importance.

Why a rhinoceros?

The difficulty with identifying the tooth was understandable. Dinosaurs had been discovered (although the word dinosaur was yet to be used) and studied in Britain and Europe for some time now, with many of the more impressive specimens coming from Lyme Regis in Dorset. Ichthyosaurs and Plesiosaurs abounded, as did smallish Pterosaurs and, of course, ammonites. Frequently, the creatures were depicted by the artists of the day in an tableux of carnage, with ichthyosar attacking plesiosaur, pleasiosaur attacking pterosaur, and everthing attacking the poor old ammonite. It seemed that the intellectual elite of the 1800's had no problem imagining an ante-Diluvian nightmare of 'dragons' and 'serpents'. But to suggest, as Mantell was doing, that there was room for a massive herbivore was nothing less that ridiculous. Which is why the tooth was rejected out of hand as belonging to a long extinct rhino. What Mantell needed was a jaw-bone with some of the teeth attached. Fossils were appearing from the Tilgate forest quarry but, as yet, there was no jaw-bone. What Mantell was finding though, were fossilised plants and trees, most notably euphorbia.

In some ways, the vegetal finds were at least as intriguing as the animal finds (or lack of them). Mantell was witnessing tree ferns and tropical plants coming out of the ground. Not just any ground, but the ground of Sussex. What were they doing there? There could only be two conclusions. The first is that the 'tropical' plants were evidence that at some point in the remote past there was a cool, temperate version of euphorbia and the palms. This didn't make sense though. If there were temperate euphorbia then, where were they now? This left the other conclusion. That at some point in remote history, the environment of Sussex was greatly different to that of today. The difficulty this idea would present to the 19th century mind may not be immediately apparent. But to Mantell, as religious a man as any of his time, the Earth had been proved by the clergy to be no more than 6,000 years old, and what's more, a definite sequence of events had been laid down for those six millenia, none of which mentioned Sussex being a tropical paradise.