Description:
Anyone interested in dinosaurs will know the name Mantell and link it to one of the first dinosaurs in the world to be discovered--Iguanodon. Algernon Gideon Mantell (1790-1852) was primarily a country doctor who also seriously "dabbled" in fossils. But, beyond his published work about fossils, it has been difficult until now to find out much reliable information about him. There are plenty of stories associated with the discovery of the Iguanodon fossils. The most popular one recounts that Mantell's wife found them by chance, while waiting for Mantell to see a patient. It gives a nice, conservative sense of Victorian family values, but Dennis Dean finally debunks this myth once and for all. Largely, Mantell has been relegated to an "also-ran" in the story of how the dinosaurs were first discovered and then invented as a special group of extinct reptiles by British scientists in the early decades of the 19th century. Dean, a retired university academic, has done Mantell and the history of the science of the period a great service. His meticulously researched biography is a tour de force, and it gives the reader the feeling that no stone has been left unturned in researching this story. It is fairly academic in tone, with lots of footnotes and references. But those bitten by the dino-bug are fairly used to arcane details. Dean was particularly lucky to have found a previously unused and major source of Mantell manuscripts and documents, hidden away in New Zealand. It turns out that Mantell's son, Walter Mantell (1820-1895), took his father's effects to New Zealand in 1859 and eventually donated them to the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington. The story Dean tells gives fascinating insights into the struggle the scientists of the time had dealing with the new fossil material--which was turning all preconceived ideas of the prehistoric world upside down. Nothing in the living world could prepare them to cope with the peculiarities of the extinct fossil reptiles. Dean clearly admires Mantell and his work, and he goes to great lengths to present his side of the story, which has been otherwise obscured, particularly by the larger reputation of Sir Richard Owen. The intricacies of the plot and the characters are worthy of Charles Dickens. Owen seems to have been monstrously loathsome, not dissimilar to the early portrayal of Iguanodon as a "low serpent-like creature." Indeed, Mantell described Owen as "an unprincipled varlet" in a letter he wrote to the famous American geologist Professor Benjamin Silliman of Yale. --Douglas Palmer, Amazon.co.uk
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