Winnie's Dinosaur Day

He sent the tooth to Cuvier in Paris for an opinion, but the great Frenchman dismissed it as being from a hippopotamus. (Cuvier later apologized handsomely for this uncharacteristic error.) One day while doing research at the Hunterian Museum in London, Mantell fell into conversation with a fellow researcher who told him the tooth looked very like those of animals he had been studying, South American iguanas. A hasty comparison confirmed the resemblance. And so MantellБЂ™s creature became Iguanodon, after a basking tropical lizard to which it was not in any manner related. Mantell prepared a paper for delivery to the Royal Society. Unfortunately it emerged that another dinosaur had been found at a quarry in Oxfordshire and had just been formally described-by the Reverend Buckland, the very man who had urged him not to work in haste. It was the Megalosaurus, and the name was actually suggested to Buckland by his friend Dr. James Parkinson, the would-be radical and eponym for ParkinsonБЂ™s disease. Buckland, it may be recalled, was foremost a geologist, and he showed it with his work on Megalosaurus ...»