Chapter objectives

• Outline the history of paleontological thought

• Understand relationships to larger intellectual movements

• Introduce the stories of some famous paleontologists

• Provide a historical context for the subjects discussed in this book

The idea of ideas

Ernest Rutherford once infamously remarked, “In science there is only physics; all the rest is stamp collecting.” And what could be more like stamp collecting than paleontology, that endless litany of names, dates, and locations?

Paleontology would be stamp collecting, if it weren't for the ideas – the creativity – that grew with the field. The history of paleontology, therefore, is really the history of the ideas that forged the discipline. And those ideas are the subject of this chapter.

In the beginning

Western tradition usually identifies the beginning of dinosaur paleontology as 1822, when Mary Ann Mantell, wife of English physician Gideon Mantell, found large teeth along a Sussex country lane while her husband was busily tending patients (Figure 14.1). Gideon was something of a fossil collector, and the discovery baffled him, because the teeth looked very much like those of the living herbivorous lizard Iguana, but were ominously much, much bigger (Figure 14.2).

But of course the Mantells weren't the first humans to see dinosaur fossils; however, they may have been the first to interpret them meaningfully in a Western scientific context.