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which the hero must attempt to sort a mass of dirt and poppy seeds or separate mixed grains into their constituent parts. These labours are usually accomplished with magical help, and they occur, to give a pair of examples, in the tale of Eros and Psyche and in some of the overlapping yarns that are spun around the Russian witch Baba Yaga. I mention these myths because I think they are helpful in imagining the impossibility of the task Mantell set himself when he began to piece together from a rubble of broken and disparate bones an animal whose very existence was only just short of unimaginable.
    Convincing the scientific establishment of the significance of his find was never going to be easy. Mantell was a country doctor; despite his evident brilliance he was not immediately welcomed into academic circles, and though he built up many sustaining friendships with geologists, he was also so peculiarly unlucky he sometimes felt himself quite sincerely to be cursed. In 1822 he published a book about his finds in the Weald that to his gratification was ordered four times over by the king, George IV. But despite its success, the book was not enough to get his suspicions about the giant lizard accepted. For this he needed the validation of the Geological Society, but its members rejected Mantell’s thesis, suggesting politely that he must have been mistaken about the age of the rock in which the bones were found.
    The next summer a friend took the tooth across the Channel to show it to the great French naturalist Georges Cuvier, but he too was dismissive, announcing that it must have derived from some sort of rhinoceros. On the verge of total despair, Mantell resolved to focus his efforts on proving the rock quarried at Whiteman’s Green was indeed from a Secondary strata, and thus considerably older than the Tertiary rock in which mammalian remains were customarily discovered.
    Two things changed his fortunes. Among the mess of bones that had been hauled from Whiteman’s Green were other teeth, equally large but with a tearing surface that was instantly declarative of a carnivore. Mantell wasn’t the only person to have discovered such relics. The geologist William Buckland had in his possession the partial skeleton of a massive animal found near Oxford, which, as luck would have it, was unmistakably of reptilian origin. The story of the Oxford lizard is as complex in its way as that of the iguanodon, but it is sufficient for our purposes to say that in 1824 Buckland announced his discovery of megalosaurus, the first land dinosaur – though that word had still not been invented – to be officially identified. Mantell was present at this meeting of the Geological Society and, screwing up his courage, stood to announce the carnivorous teeth he’d also discovered in the Weald. Buckland agreed to visit him in Lewes, and there conceded that the teeth did belong to megalosaurus, which he thought – wrongly, as it turned out – might turn out to ‘have equalled in height our largest elephant and in length fallen little short of the largest whale’.
    The world was rapidly shifting towards an acceptance of Mantell’s theory, and a few weeks after the meeting in which the megalosaurus was unveiled, Cuvier finally agreed that the giant herbivorous teeth were indeed reptilian in origin. Mantell was intensely gratified, and soon after came almost by chance upon the conclusive evidence he’d so long sought. Early that autumn he spent a day at the Royal College of Surgeons, searching through the Hunterian Museum’s vast reserve of anatomical specimens to see if he could find a reptilian tooth that bore even a vague resemblance to his find. The work was dispiriting, and he was about to give it up when the assistant curator, Samuel Stutchbury, came ambling over for a chat. Stutchbury, it transpired, was familiar with tropical reptiles from having worked sporadically at cataloguing the specimens that slave ships sometimes deposited in