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interest in geology between delivering the town’s babies. His father had not been able to afford to send him to university, and the poverty of his background bothered him intensely. The Mantells had once been noble, and like many poor and clever children, Gideon dreamed of restoring his family name. He’d been collecting fossils since childhood; the first, an ammonite, he found just beneath the surface of one of the streams that fed the Ouse.
    In the undulating landscape around Lewes Mantell carried out his earliest explorations, turning up the belemnites and bivalves that betrayed the chalk’s origins on the bed of an ancient ocean. In 1816 he married, and after that he shifted his investigations north, focusing particularly on a patch of the Weald about ten miles shy of Lewes. The ground here was sandstone, and the fossils it contained were very different from the marine remains he’d become accustomed to unearthing. When his preliminary excavations at Whiteman’s Green quarry revealed large bones of a kind he’d never seen before, Mantell tipped off a quarryman and was soon receiving packages of random body parts: disarticulated forms that arrived sometimes individually and sometimes as a mass embedded in rock. He worked on them by night after his doctor’s rounds were finished, teasing the bones free with a chisel in the drawing room at Castle Place, the beautiful townhouse he’d bought beneath the castle.
    The sheer size of the bones was baffling. Mantell thought at first they might belong to an ichthyosaur, but he was disabused of this notion when he began to notice that some of the rocks from Whiteman’s Green contained traces of tropical vegetation: feathery fronds that resembled palms and tree ferns; prints of leaves that looked strangely like euphorbias, which grew in Asia and were not native to these islands. If the strata he was investigating had, as he suspected, once lain beneath a now eroded layer of chalk, then it seemed he had stumbled upon the remains of a tropical world, submerged at some unguessable period by a sea that had itself long since receded. This made the size of the bones all the more intriguing. By the early nineteenth century fossils of giant mammals were regularly being found in Europe, among them mammoths, mastodons and some sort of ancestor of the elephant. But these were always found in Tertiary rock, whereas Mantell was almost certain his bones came from a deeper and correspondingly far older layer. Ancient crocodiles had also been unearthed on the coast of France, and this had begun to seem the likeliest source for the bones when Mary Ann Mantell, Gideon’s wife, stumbled across something strange.
    Mantell left several written versions of this story, none of which quite tally in detail or date. What seems clear is that at some point in 1820 or 1821, his wife came across a giant tooth – perhaps more than one – on the road near Whiteman’s Green, where it lay amid some stones recently hauled from the quarry. This tooth, which Mantell sometimes claimed he’d found himself, was the key to the bone puzzle, though it would take some four or five years to properly decode. More were soon found, and close inspection immediately ruled out the possibility that they’d derived from any sort of crocodile. They clearly belonged to a herbivore, being designed for grinding and much eroded by use. Even in their worn state they were huge: up to 1.4 inches long and, in Mantell’s own words, ‘so remarkable that the most superficial observer would have been struck with their appearance as something novel and interesting’. If they weren’t from a mammal or a fish, what else could they be? The thought perplexed him, and at last, very tentatively, he began to draw the only remaining conclusion: some giant, hitherto unguessed-at member of the lizard tribe.
    When I think of Mantell’s work, I am reminded of a type of story common to both Greek myths and the folk tales of northern Europe, in