William Buckland Theologian, Paleontologist, World Class Eccentric

So we're going to start off with William Butler. He was one of the very first paleontologists that looked at dinosaur bones ever and was trying to figure out what they were scientifically. Though he wasn't necessarily the first European paleontologist, he got his start at the same place. So this is a quote about William Butler. He's one of the greatest geologists of his time, a man of great energy. So now, he got his start at actually the same place as the European paleontologist got his start at. Over in England, where he was born on March 12, 1784, he grew up near Lyles, Florida. This is actually a couple of miles away from his childhood home, and it's where Mary Anning found the first ichthyosaurus remains. So one of the very first fossil animals that we had recognized as something that wasn't around today was actually found here. Things like anhydrite shells have been found sometimes, but they were recognized as things that came out of the ocean. There's already plenty of shell creatures, and that's what a lot of she was finding here as well, things just washing right out of the cliff shore. These cliffs would have been seabed after the early Jurassic period. So she walked along and found a bunch of fossils there. Growing up around this is probably a big inspiration to Butler, who had always found the geology pretty interesting. After he'd grown up, he attended Corpus Christi College, Oxford, in 1801. He got his bachelor's in mineralogy in 1804 and attended, from the sounds of it, every single lecture the school offered, and he was there again. Then he got his master's in 1808, and actually got a fellowship the same year at the priesthood that's connected to Oxford. A lot of his career was actually as a theologian, so sort of a religious scholar, and that tied in a lot with his paleontology, though. He ended up being pretty smart in the end, not dunking on the ocean, but a lot of the time, he'd go, I think this has to be from this, and then he'd say, no, no, that's not from the Great Flood. Also, they always call it the Great Deluge in the 1800s for some reason. Flood sounds way cooler than deluge to me. So that's where he went to school. After he was appointed reader in mineralogy in 1813, so that means he had to be in charge of a lot of the lectures and that, he immediately set in adding more geology and mineralogy. Paleontology didn't quite exist yet as a science, so he couldn't really add that in, but mineralogy and geology were immediately made much more common. He was really well-known for using lots of specimens. He's got, it's hard to tell, he's got an anemite there, and there's a bunch of tusks and fossils, there's a little reptile there, another anemite, a tusk of something, a big rhino skull down there, and then these giant mats you can see over on the far side. It was noted a lot of the time, like, hey, did you see all those fossil objects? That guy's pretty cool. He was really well-known for getting the class energized and interested in what he was doing. A lot of people, even from outside of the college, started to come in and regularly attend his lectures. So he paced like a Franciscan creature, up and down behind a long showcase. He had in his hands a huge hyena skull. He suddenly dashed down the steps, rushed the skull in the hand of the first graduate on the front bench and shouted, what rules the world? The youth, terrified, threw himself against the next back seat and answered not a word. He rushed it in to me, pointed that hyena full-on in my face. What rules the world? I have no idea, I said. The stomach, sir, he cried. Rules the world. The greatest ones eat the less, and the less eat the lesser still. It was Henry Affleck, one of his students at the time. And that skull, actually the first pictures in the beginning, he was holding a skull of something. That's not the hyena skull he's talking about. It's Krokuta sphalia. So it's the same genus as modern day African hyenas, like the spotted hyenas, and it's Krokuta, Krokuta. But he was living in caves up in England. A lot of his work was done in, with some of the cavey paleontology you can find up there. So the next one is Kurt Dale Cave. Now he started, the earliest notes we have of him in Kurt Dale, specifically are from 1812. And the original idea, and what he went there to prove, is that these animals, because there was a lot of weird stuff there. It was what they could tell were elephant life remains, there were rhino bones in there, hyenas, big deer and elk that just don't live in that area anymore. They thought, and what he wanted to prove, was that yes, this is a great flood. It washed all these things in here. They got stuck in there. Then it's just a leftover. Everything else got too buried. These little caves are the only pockets of everything being washed around down there. As he started to look at it, though, he realized that there was not just hyena bones in there. There was a whole lot of hyena bones, and everything that wasn't hyena bones had nipple marks on it from hyena teeth. So then he realized, no, maybe this was a den for just natural hyenas that were living in here. Normally they're dragging food back in to eat it. But he still thought that first layer, the newest layer of mud in the cave, would have been put down from the flood. This was about three or four inches deep. It's a lot of mud to be washed in in one place. This is from 1824, and I just love this description of his collection, and what it led to, his office and the school being. On repairing from the Starr Inn to Butlin's Domicile in Corpus Christi College, I can never forget the scene which awaited me. Having, by direction of the janitor, climbed up a narrow staircase, I entered a long corridor-like room, which was filled with rocks, shells, and bones in a dire confusion. In a sort of sanctum, at the end was my friend in his black gown looking like a necromancer, sitting on the only rickety chair not covered with fossils and cleaning out the fossil bones from the matrix. So just this long, narrow, filled to the brim with a bunch of what anybody else would consider junk and rocks, but he knows it's cool stuff and rocks, which are just cool stuff. And then he's sitting there in the one only chair cleaning out more bones from it, and almost all the pictures I'm going to see is in some sort of academic gown, which I didn't mention in here. It seems like he just liked to wear it. There's lots of accounts of his students going on digs with him, and it's hot in the summertime. He's in his all black layered academic gown, and in the letters back and forth, we're just like, does he not die? That's a lot of clothing for the summertime on the beach. He did have a family. He got his wife, Mary, and their eldest son, Frank, down there sitting on a tusk. It's a family silhouette from the time. He married Mary Morland in December of 1825, and he had nine children with Frank being the eldest of them. Five of them survived to adulthood, which was the trend at the time, sadly. They had a pretty good home life. Frank talks a lot about how his mother was pretty mad at him because Buckland did a lot of the science they were doing, especially around the house, and they kept doing science in the house. Buckland had brought back to examine at home a slab of footprint fossils of the time, and then Mary mentioned, hey, doesn't this kind of look like a tortoise? So Buckland runs outside and finds the nearest tortoise. Mary immediately starts covering this table, the kitchen table, with a thick plastery paste at the time, and then they plop the tortoise down, watch him walk to the end of the table, and say, yeah, this looks exactly like the discovery fossils we found. There's a lot of recreations of it, but I wasn't able to find a picture or a drawing of the original incident, so I totally would have put it in here if I had it. Now, of course, what William Buckland is known for is not necessarily the tortoises that are wearing the academic gowns. It's megalosaurus. So it was found and brought these jawbones in 1827, and he studied them for about 20 years. It wasn't until 1842 that he published a description. This is from that description. This is the lithographer here, the picture of it. So this is all that megalosaurus was based on. Like was mentioned in the announcement, he didn't really know what a dinosaur was at the time. This was the first now-known-to-be-a-dinosaur described to science. He thought it was a great reptile, which is part of where the name megalosaurus comes from. Mega is great, and saurus is reptile. And we hardly looked at the teeth, though what we now know megalosaurus to be a pretty standard-looking meat-eating dinosaur. Torvosaurus here in the park is one of the best-known members of the family. The reconstructions of megalosaurus at the time look a little bit more like what's on the next slide. A lot more lizard in this great lizard than you see today. This is what the Crystal Palace megalosaurus showed. That was a big sculpture park made with megalosaurus and iguanodon. Because just a few years after megalosaurus was named, iguanodon ended up being named. And so Richard Owen, the Mexican, sought a lot of assistance from London sought his opinions in grouping megalosaurus and iguanodon together to form Dinosauria as a new group. And he kept doing a lot of mythology past then. He really liked to go travel around. He ended up making friends with the prince at the time of England, and that enabled him a lot of new friends. So he was able to do a lot of traveling to foreign places. And his ideas about Kirkdale Cave were changed a lot when he went to Switzerland in 1838. So that's a while he's in the midst of describing megalosaurus. This trip took place. And he saw, the next slide, this area of erosion of a certain one. When he noticed this, a lot of the erosion here, because this is still an active glacier country, so chunks will break off into big glaciers as they slide around and chew the rock up underneath them. A lot of the exact same geology here is seen around Kirkdale Cave in the areas where Parkland spent a lot of his time now that he's a scholar moving around England. He realized that most of the erosion he'd been putting up to, the Great Deluge, was probably just a big ice sheet that was covering England at the time. He was one of the first people to actually propose that theory. It wasn't he first. It was some of his students that brought it to him. And one of his colleagues was the first major guy to really argue this theory. But Parkland was the loudest and the most famous to argue for this theory at the time. The professor he went to meet was Louis Agassiz. Known eccentricities. I was going to make this a screenshot of a Wikipedia page that says that, but I just didn't like the way that looked. Because that's the best thing. I hope my Wikipedia page one day has a tag of known eccentricities on it. And while it was mentioned in the announcement, so I might as well call it out, Agassiz wasn't going to put the bear in here. But he had a pet bear. It was a small brown bear. They liked to take it to parties and give it alcohol. And then just watch it. And the bear seemed to have a good time. It really enjoyed it. Come on, snake! That really was. Also, for another learning about paleontology through living animals, where that's a lot of what we do, is, of course, look at, well, this animal's built kind of like this fossil animal. Let's see what other similarities they might have that could fill us in on their life cycle. Well, that was a lot of new stuff at the time. A lot of stuff that's known about now wasn't known about then. So he got to be a lot more hands-on in a lot of ways. He had found, again, going back to Kurt Dale Cave, the story kind of centers around that. In and around Kurt Dale Cave, things he thought were hyena droppings that had fossilized. So any reasonable person, when you think you've found hyena droppings, you go buy a hyena and tell everyone in your house, if you see this guy start to do his business, you grab whatever comes into the area and bring it to him immediately. And it turns out, yeah, what he was finding in and around those caves were more likely than not hyena droppings, almost exactly. Even the way they chew up bones and how the bones get softened and rounded down by their digestive tract, you see the exact same thing happening with bone fragments in these fossil droppings. It's one of the first times noted that we studied coprolites. This one, oh, did I put that in there? No, I didn't, I'll just have to read this account myself. So John Ruskin, for example, this is a direct quotation off of Yale's website, always regretted the day of unlucky engagement on which he missed a delicate toast of mice at the Butlin's home. Because William Butlin, for some reason, wanted to eat every member of the animal kingdom. Not that he liked it. Most of his notes that are written down and survived to this day are just about how bad he thinks it tasted. He got enough flies to make a stew with once. He said it was the worst thing he'd ever eaten. Apparently, the mice was a good, he liked the toasted mice. Don't, I feel like he's got a messed up grade in theory, though, so I don't know how much I really want to test him. Probably the most insane claim about him liking to eat weird things is, and I love this, it's debated, but I don't know how many other people, this could ever be a serious debate about why would this happen. Talk of strange relics led to mention of the heart of a French king preserved in Newham in a silver casket. Dr. Butlin, whilst looking at it, explained that I've eaten many strange things, but I've never eaten the heart of a king before. And before anyone could think or do, he had gobbled it up and the precious relic was lost forever by Augustus Hare. Yeah, even if he didn't do it, I wouldn't, like, why does anyone in George Washington eat a guy's heart once? They'd be, no, no, there's no debate about that. That's 100% didn't happen. But Bartlett gets, well, we can't be 100% sure he didn't eat a guy's heart once. That wouldn't even be good. Preserved in a silver casket, this thing was dried out for like 100 years by this point. Yup. But man, he had, he wanted to eat every member of the animal kingdom and he sucked to it. He had, this is, I don't know if you'd consider this a Butlindic centricity, but his horse, an old mare that he rode around a lot, I think he taught it to love geology. Because his son, later on, after his passing, would mention, yeah, if you rode by any cool rocks on this horse, it would stop and it wouldn't move until you got off and picked up a rock or something and put it in the saddlebag. Because the horse had just learned from riding around with Butlund, hey, there's a cool rock or something here, you're not going anywhere for a while, all of a sudden. And it just followed, he didn't have to tie it up, it just kept a few paces behind him whenever he was in a quarry so that he could go and take stuff back to the saddlebags to store on it. Now sometime later, in 1845, so this is just after the naming of Megalosaurus, he was appointed the dean of Westminster on recommendation of Robert Peel, and he immediately instigated repairs to the abbey and the school. More determined to change the school's focus to mineralogy and geology, and this newfangled thing, paleontology, he was starting to be a part of. Though he had passed just a few, about 10 years after, on August 14th, 1856. He wasn't done being a bit of a weirdo, though. Because there was one geological discovery that he didn't tell anybody about until after he had passed. This is the Jurassic limestone that goes through the lower half of England. A lot of this was discovered by Buckley. That's actually another one that's interesting because there's so many. I didn't even think about this one while I was writing this whole thing. He could taste the dirt anywhere in England and tell you where you were. Just by licking your hand, you're like, I don't know, are you alright? We're exactly here. He found this outcropping by Oxford, and didn't tell anybody about it, but did stipulate, okay, I'm going to donate all this money to the school, but you've got to bury me in this exact spot. I want you to bury me. Jurassic limestone is really tough. Turns out, it's right where he wanted to be buried. He discovered it after having dressed the limestone, didn't tell anybody about it, until they had to dynamite a hole for his coffin to be lowered into. Which they did end up having to break the dynamite out to bury him there. They said, well, gosh darn it, if you want to be buried in here, you're not going to get all that cool donation stuff if you don't bury him here. Don't get the mind games, folks. So that's just sort of a brief overview of William Buckland, and there's a lot that he did. Kind of a celebrity for his time, I have an entire book I got just for this, of letters written to people about Buckland. Not to Buckland, but written between other people about Buckland. Like, oh my gosh, this guy's so cool. Or alternatively, oh, this guy's so weird! Me and a heart! Why do you do that?