Dinosaurs and culture wars

Last week marked the 200th anniversary of the most significant evening in the history of palaeontology. On 20 February 1824, the learned gentlemen of the Geological Society gathered at their rooms on Bedford Street in Covent Garden for a meeting that would transform human understanding of prehistoric life. To begin, the clergyman William Conybeare announced and described the Plesiosaurus. A vast marine lizard that Mary Anning had discovered in Dorset, the Plesiosaurus was memorably described as ‘a serpent threaded through the shell of a turtle’; it would later leap from the rocks of Lyme Regis into the fiction of Jules Verne and Arthur Conan Doyle, and into the popular imagination as the Loch Ness monster.

Next and more sensationally, the Oxford don William Buckland offered his solution to a mystery that had been puzzling university scholars for more than 150 years.