Walking with dinosaurs is something you can actually do in Yorkshire! The coastline around Scarborough is famous for its dinosaur trackways, so much so that Yorkshire coast has earned the nickname “The Dinosaur Coast”! You may recall early in 2023 a particularly large footprint was discovered at Burniston, north of Scarborough, with an iconic three toed outline suggesting this belonged to a large meat-eating dinosaur – something like a Megalosaurus! I say, something like, because you can never be completely certain when all you have is a footprint. Despite the abundance of trackways in Yorkshire only a handful of dinosaur bones have been discovered (many of them from inland sites!). Here at Fossils in t’ Hills we’re all about amazing yet underappreciated inland fossils and their stories, so let’s delve into the tale of the first dinosaur to be described by science and follow its trail to a beautiful fossil from Yorkshire! To tell the tale of Megalosaurus, the first dinosaur named by science, I first need to transport you to London, 200 years ago. It’s February 1824. You’re attending a lecture at the Geological Society. You’ve just been listening to a most riveting talk about a complete plesiosaur skeleton discovered by Mary Anning earlier that winter (which is now lodged in the downstairs rooms, too heavy to make it into the meeting room). For our next speaker we introduce the Reverend William Buckland, recently elected President of the Geological Society and lecturer at Oxford University. You may have met him before - two years earlier Buckland was up in Yorkshire exploring Kirkdale Cave and concluding that it was inhabited by hyenas! (you can check out our blog on this later). This time Buckland is here to speak of the “Great Fossil Lizard of Stonesfield”. His talk takes us further back in time, to describe a series of bones excavated from a mine just outside Oxford at Stonesfield. Bones had been discovered there in the middle of the 18th Century from three ‘slate’ beds within an oolitic limestone. These huge bones were considered to have belonged to hippos or rhinos or other similar large modern mammals. Among the fossil bones was a piece of jaw with a single, recurved, and serrated tooth standing proud of the rest. Buckland recognized these teeth as belonging to something altogether more reptilian. From these bones and others he had seen Buckland describes a “…carnivorous creature of enormous magnitude…” Estimated to be up to 20 meters long and reconstructed as walking on all four limbs and amphibious - say hello to our first glimpse at Megalosaurus. This is obviously a world away from the gracile therapod walking on its two hind limbs that we know of today but as with many of these prehistoric creatures they will undergo numerous revisions and reimaginings between their discovery and the present. There is one word missing from Buckland’s presentation though - nowhere does he call his “Great Fossil Lizard” a dinosaur. Not once. Why? The word wouldn’t be invented for another 18 years! It would take the description of Iguanodon the following year (1825) and an ankylosaur called Hylaeosaurus (1832) and then ANOTHER ten years before “dinosaur” became a word! Let us now fast forward to 1842. We now must introduce Sir Richard Owen, later to become one of the driving forces behind the creation of the London Natural History Museum but at this point Hunterian Professor of Anatomy at the Royal College of Surgeons. If you take a dip into the history of palaeontology it won’t take you long to come across this character. Owen, a Lancastrian by birth, was generally regarded as a bit of miser (many of his Victorian-era colleagues might have called him a few other choice words at the time…). It is Owen, who in his Report on British Fossil Reptiles Part II describes how the features of the pelvic region, vertebrae, ribs, long bones, and their terrestrial lifestyle are: “…deemed sufficient ground[s] for establishing a distinct tribe or sub-order of Saurian Reptiles, for which I would propose the name of Dinosauria” And so the dinosaurs (Greek for 'terrible lizards') received their name at last! Now by this point you are probably thinking that this is all very interesting but how does inland Yorkshire fit in here? If you read Owen’s Report on British Fossil Reptiles you will find this extract: “ in some private collections in the town of Malton, Yorkshire, are teeth, unquestionably belonging to the same species as the Stonesfield Megalosaurus, from the oolite in the neighborhood of that town” Incredible as it seems, in the paper that first defines a dinosaur there is a reference to fossil dinosaur remains in Yorkshire – and not the famous trackways of the coast! So, what do we know about these teeth? Unfortunately, very little. Owen refers to several teeth but doesn’t include drawings. A tooth belonging to Megalosaurus is listed in several later 19th Century texts as having been found in a quarry at Slingsby (around 5 miles west of Malton) before entering the care of the Yorkshire Philosophical Society – this is the society that was behind the formation of the Yorkshire Museum in the Museum Gardens of York. Returning to 2024, let us now head to the Yorkshire Museum, and walk though the galleries, past mighty skeletons of marine reptiles and into a room with dinosaur footprints. There is a glass case with a single tooth, preserved on the edge of a block of oolite and with an old-fashioned paper label attached to the front that reads: “Tooth of the Megalosaurus presented by Dr Murray” The line below is a little harder to read, the ink having faded over the last century and a half, but I kind of hope it reads: “….the finest specimen of this kind known” This specimen was donated to the museum in 1869, so it isn’t entirely outside of the realms of possibility that in 1842 it was held in a private collection and is at least one of the specimens that Owen was referring to. The Slingsby tooth shows the slender, curved backwards shape with the serrated concaved edge that Buckland also describes from the Stonesfield specimen. Clearly this was an animal... “admirably adapted to the destructive office for which they were designed” There are a few things about the Slingsby specimen that need to be addressed. First, the specimen was found in the Coralline Oolite Formation, the exact horizon is not recorded, but this is an entirely marine sequence – so what’s a large meat-eating dinosaur doing there? Thinking has moved on since the early 19th Century and we no longer believe Megalosaurus to have been an amphibious reptile. What was more likely the case was this carnivore lived on one of the many islands that punctuated the shallow tropical sea that extended across much of Europe at the time. It was likely that the tooth was either lost through natural replacement processes, or the animal died and the body or bones were washed out to sea where they came to rest on the seafloor. The second issue is the age of these rocks. Although Buckland’s specimen was also collected from an oolite formation, it is not the same unit - indeed the Yorkshire specimen may be up to 14 million years younger than the Oxford specimen. Is this too long an interval for the two specimens to be the same species? The jury is out on that, but we can say with some certainty that the Slingsby tooth belongs to a Megalosaurid dinosaur, meaning if it isn’t Megalosaurus then it was closely related to it. Since 1824 Megalosaurus has undergone a few identity crises of its own. Not only has our interpretation of what the creature looked like changed considerably, but also the identification of the very bones themselves! From a more recent reassessment of the Stonesfield bones it would seem that there may be two different species present in the jumble and the only one with sufficient characteristics to really define a species from is that iconic jaw section so beautifully illustrated by Mary Morland. This Year marks the 200th anniversary of official announcement of Megalosaurus, the first dinosaur to be scientifically described (even if they didn’t know it was a dinosaur at the time…) – so why not celebrate the occasion by going to see Yorkshire’s very own ‘Megalosaurus’ fossil in the Yorkshire Museum! Author: Jed Atkinson References
Benson, R.B., Barrett, P.M., Powell, H.P. and Norman, D.B., 2008. The taxonomic status of Megalosaurus bucklandii (Dinosauria, Theropoda) from the Middle Jurassic of Oxfordshire, UK. Palaeontology, 51(2), pp.419-424. Boylan, P.J., 1984. William Buckland, 1784 - 1856: Scientific Institutions, Vertebrate Palaeontology, and Quaternary Geology. University of Leicester. Thesis. Buckland, W. 1824. Notice on the Megalosaurus or great fossil lizard of Stonesfield. Transactions of the Geological Society of London, 21, 390–397, pls 40–44. Buckland, W. 1836. Geology and Mineralogy Considered with Reference to Natural Theology. Vol 2. William Pickering: London. Hudson, J.G., Romano, M., Lomax, D.R., Taylor, R. and Woods, M., 2023. A new giant theropod dinosaur track from the Middle Jurassic of the Cleveland Basin, Yorkshire, UK. Proceedings of the Yorkshire Geological Society, 64(3-4), pp.pygs2022-008. Owen, R. 1842. Report on British fossil reptiles. Part II. Reports of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, 11, 60–20 Owen, R. 1857. Monograph on the Fossil Reptilia of the Wealden Formations. Part III. Megalosaurus Bucklandi, Monographs of the Palaeontographical Society, 9:34, 1-26, Whyte, M.A., Romano, M., and Watts, W. 2010. Yorkshire dinosaurs: a history in two parts. From: Moody, R. T. J., Buffetaut, E., Naish, D. & Martill, D. M. (eds) Dinosaurs and Other Extinct Saurians: A Historical Perspective. Geological Society, London, Special Publications, 343, 189–207.
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