The Dinosaur Hunters

"This was a huge bestseller. It is another historical book dealing with the very earliest discovery of dinosaurs, pre-dating the spectacular finds in the US, which most people don’t realise were actually found in southern England – Sussex, Surrey, Kent and the Isle of Wight. These were the first fossils ever to be described scientifically, back in the early part of the 19th century. She deals with the circumstances of the discoveries, how they were initially interpreted, because nothing like this had ever been seen before, and also the personal rivalries between the scientists who were working on this very rare material. The two main protagonists are Gideon Mantell, a Sussex-based country doctor who was actually someone who went out looking for these remains as a kind of obsessive hobby, and did a lot of work in finding and describing these animals. His nemesis, if you like, was Richard Owen who went on to become the first director of the Natural History Museum. Owen was a career academic and a brilliant man but didn’t have all the scruples that you may have wanted. They competed very strongly and there were some very nasty incidents on both sides. Owen would rip off Mantell’s ideas, try and poach specimens from collections that Mantell was working with and try to suppress publication of some of Mantell’s work. In return, although Mantell was definitely on the receiving end, he was a vain character and was so obsessive about these animals that his doctor’s practice went to seed, his wife left him (which was very unusual at that time, but he was so obsessed with these things) and his eldest son emigrated to New Zealand to get away from him. So you have these two very irascible characters competing. They are not very common in Japan, though there are more now in the updated directory, I think. It depends when. When they first appeared the continents were all joined in a single land-mass called Pangaea. Through the time the dinosaurs were around that land-mass breaks up, so when T. rex was around, close to the end of the age of dinosaurs, it’s starting to look a lot more like the world we’re familiar with today, with the Atlantic opening up and the continents approaching their present-day positions. There are about 1,200 main species of which 800 to 850 are currently considered to be valid, depending on who you ask. There is sometimes doubt over whether a particular fossil skeleton is distinctive enough to deserve a new name."