There's not much to say about the Oxfordshire village of Stonesfield, apart from the fact that it was once 'covered in crocodiles and slithering plesiosaurs'.
‘I am induced to lay before the Geological Society the annexed representations of parts of the skeleton of an enormous fossil animal.’ With these words, on February 20, 1824, the Revd William Buckland began a presentation that would go down in history. London’s Geological Society was at that point fewer than two decades old; the bones, by contrast, dated back some 168 million years — and they were not only ancient, but enormous. ‘The beast in question would have equalled in height our largest elephants,’ Buckland’s speech continued, ‘and in length fallen but little short of the largest whales.’
What he was describing, some 17 years before the word was even coined, was the first identified dinosaur. The fossils being displayed to the presumably baffled audience of academics included a jawbone, a giant thigh bone and a number of spinal vertebrae. Buckland used the name ‘Megalosaurus’ to refer to the super-sized genus from which they came. The same title is still in use today and we now know the creature to have been a bipedal theropod — similar, in many ways, to a Tyrannosaurus rex — which weighed almost a ton and a half.
These prehistoric remains, momentous as they were at the time, had not been unearthed by the painstaking excavations of palaeontologists. Rather, they’d been chanced upon by quarry workers in the little village of Stonesfield, on the eastern fringe of the Oxfordshire Cotswolds. Wander the village’s winding streets today and you’ll still see slim, hand-cut tiles on many of its rooftops. The stone they’re made from — known as Stonesfield slate, but technically a limestone — was mined here for hundreds of years. And therein lies a story.
As the pickaxe-wielding quarriers of the late 18th century dug down to uncover seams of stone, they began encountering occasional oddities in the damp ground: fragments of bone far too large to belong to any living animal. At some point, word of these discoveries reached the University of Oxford — a mere 14 miles away as the theropod roams — and, in October 1797, a reader in anatomy at Christ Church College, Sir Christopher Pegge, purchased what was described as ‘a large jawbone with two serrated teeth’ for 10 shillings and sixpence.
DTF7MD Megalosaurus jaw
‘He was collecting specimens of interest for teaching purposes,’ explains Emma Nicholls, collections manager of vertebrate palaeontology at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History. ‘It’s not really known what Pegge made of it at the time, but that jawbone is now world famous among dinosaur researchers. I once had two gentlemen flying in from Japan for the sole purpose of studying it. It’s that important.’
It was the first of many such finds that would, over time, make their way from Stonesfield to Oxford. In 1813, when the university appointed Buckland as professor of mineralogy, a more concerted attempt was made to better understand the bones emerging from the slate pits. The professor started petitioning the quarriers to actively look out for these hefty underground fossils, offering attractive fees for anything of interest that was discovered.
‘The area was clearly extremely biodiverse,’ continues Dr Nicholls. ‘During the Middle Jurassic era, most of what is now Britain was underwater and the Stonesfield taxa — that is, the animals and plants that have been found there — show an environment that was warm and humid, on the edge of an inland sea.’ If such a concept seems otherworldly to anyone familiar with modern-day Oxfordshire, so, too, do the prehistoric species identified here: where today there are grey squirrels and allotment-nibbling rabbits, there were once crocodiles and slithering plesiosaurs.
It was the as-yet-unidentified Megalosaurus bones, however, that most intrigued Buckland. He commissioned the naturalist Mary Morland to make detailed illustrations of the fossils, which were then sent to French anatomist George Cuvier. The three experts corresponded extensively and, piece by piece, the Jurassic jigsaw took shape. Cuvier visited Oxford in 1817 to examine a large femur, becoming convinced it was reptilian in origin; likewise, Buckland noted lizard-like qualities to the fossilised teeth. The technical drawings of Morland — who would go on to marry Buckland in 1825 — were invaluable in supporting the theories being discussed.
With the additional help of physician and keen geologist James Parkinson, who not only discovered Parkinson’s disease, but was the first to use the name Megalosaurus, meaning ‘great lizard’, to describe the fossils, Buckland was ready to present his findings to the Geological Society in 1824. Two hundred years on, with dinosaurs now playing a titanic part in our understanding of the past, the rest is history — or should that be prehistory?
‘Buckland’s presentation was so important because it was the first time this kind of animal had been recognised and presented to the world. He was describing an incredible creature,’ reflects Dr Nicholls. ‘The magnitude of dinosaurs in modern-day culture is off the scale — there’s not a country in the world where people haven’t heard of them — but, at the time, he didn’t have any of the palaeontological context that we have today.’
The word ‘dinosaur’ was introduced by biologist Richard Owen in 1841, bringing the Megalosaurus discoveries into sharper focus. The final slate pit in Stonesfield, meanwhile, was closed shortly before the First World War. Poet Dr Romola Parish has written of the village as ‘an unassuming place whose roots lie/not in dreaming spires or Cotswolds prettiness,/but in the slates that roof the colleges and cottages of Oxfordshire’. On the bicentenary of Buckland’s historic presentation, it’s worth remembering that its quarries gave the world something no less tangible: its first named dinosaur.
Ben Lerwill is a freelance writer and author of children’s stories
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