The College was delighted to see William Buckland (1784-1856), Corpus Fellow from 1808 to 1825, featured in the 22 February issue of The Week Junior’s ‘This Week in History’ section.
The article, entitled ‘The first naming of a dinosaur’, told its young readers that Buckland made the first scientific mention of a dinosaur in a research paper 201 years ago on 20 February 1824. It explained how he described a creature based on fossils that had been found in Oxfordshire over many years, which he thought belonged to a giant lizard and that he chose the name Megalosaurus from the ancient Greek words megas, meaning big, and sauros, meaning lizard.
In his article about William Buckland in the Pelican Record 2021, Timothy Baker (1979, English) wrote: "William Buckland was a central figure of the ‘English school’ of geology in the early nineteenth century. Famous for his zoophagy and eccentricity, he energised Oxford geology, made major discoveries, established an early important palaeontological collection and led the revival of science at Oxford. In 1824 Buckland was elected President of the Geological Society of London, where he announced his sensational discovery. The fossils found on several occasions over the years at Stonesfield quarry, near Oxford, were initially thought to be mammalian. However, during an 1818 visit French palaeontologist Georges Cuvier identified them as reptilian. Buckland’s 1824 paper on the Megalosaurus was the first detailed scientific description of a dinosaur."
Buckland's collections, which had started out in his rooms on Staircase 5, are preserved in the University's Museum of Natural History. They feature in the Museum's current exhibition What the colourful archives of William and Mary Buckland reveal about science, status and society.
Read Timothy Baker's article William Buckland at Corpus here.