Scientist of the Day - Samuel Stutchbury

Two jaws of Thecodontosaurus and drawings of teeth, detail of a lithographed plate in “A description of various fossil remains of three distinct saurian animals, recently discovered in the Magnesian Conglomerate near Bristol," by Henry Riley and Samuel Stutchbury, Transactions of the Geological Society of London,  plate 29, end of vol. 5, ser. 2, 1840. (Linda Hall Library)

Samuel Stutchbury, an English naturalist and museum curator, was born Jan 15, 1798. Stutchbury is the pioneer dinosaur hunter of whom no one has ever heard. If you are at all a fan of dinosaurs, you will likely know about William Buckland, who discovered and described the first dinosaur, Megalosaurus, in 1824; Gideon Mantell, who found and published the second and third dinosaurs, Iguanodon (1825) and Hylaeosaurus (1833), and Richard Owen, who put all three of these Mesozoic reptiles into a taxonomic group in 1842 and called it Dinosauria, thus inventing the word dinosaur. Indeed, if one looks at our online exhibition, Paper Dinosaurs, you will encounter Buckland, Mantell, Owen, and the three inaugural dinosaurs in the first four items of the exhibit. There is no mention of Stutchbury anywhere in the exhibition.

Portrait of Samuel Stutchbury, 1852 (Wikimedia commons)

Stutchbury worked for the Hunterian Museum in London from 1820 to 1825, and his first entry into dinosaur lore came in 1824, when Gideon Mantell, who had been hauling his Iguanodon teeth around for two years to museum after museum, trying to identify them, showed the specimens to Stutchbury (you can see the teeth on the Paper Dinosaurs site, item 2) . It was Stutchbury who remarked that they looked just like iguana teeth, only they were 20 times larger. That was all Dr. Mantell needed, and he rushed into print, claiming that he had found a huge prehistoric iguana, naming it "Iguana-Tooth", or Iguanodon. Stutchbury and his contribution is not mentioned anywhere in Mantell's 1825 paper in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. That was not a good omen.

First paragraph, “A description of various fossil remains of three distinct saurian animals, recently discovered in the Magnesian Conglomerate near Bristol," by Henry Riley and Samuel Stutchbury, Transactions of the Geological Society of London, p. 349, ser. 2, vol. 5, 1840 (Linda Hall Library)

Stutchbury then took part in an expedition to the South Seas; he returned to England in 1827 and sought another museum position, finally landing one in 1831, when he was appointed curator of the Museum of the Bristol Institution, which had been founded just 8 years earlier.  In 1834, some quarrymen brought the Museum a few bones that they had dug out of a quarry in Clifton (now part of Bristol, but then a separate town). He enlisted the help of a local surgeon, Henry Riley, and they collected a few hundred fragments of what seemed to be the remains of a Mesozoic saurian, or lizard. In 1836, they named it Thecodontosaurus (“lizard with teeth set in sockets”), and in 1840 they described it, with two lithographed plates, in the Transactions of the Geological Society of London, the very journal in which Buckland had announced his Megalosauarus 16 years earlier. The first plate shows two jaws at upper left; we offer a detail as our first image, and the complete plate as our fourth.  The second plate depicts various leg bones – femora, tibiae, ulnae, etc. – of Thecodontosaurus (fifth image).

Jaws and teeth of Thecodontosaurus and other saurians found near Bristol, lithographed plate in “A description of various fossil remains of three distinct saurian animals, recently discovered in the Magnesian Conglomerate near Bristol," by Henry Riley and Samuel Stutchbury, Transactions of the Geological Society of London, plate 29, end of vol. 5, ser. 2, 1840. (Linda Hall Library)

Various authorities visited Bristol and commented that Thecodontosaurus seemed of a kind with Megalosaurus and Iguanodon, only much smaller.  But when Owen saw the bones, he was misled by the socketed teeth, which one can also find in certain more primitive reptiles that we now call “mammal-like reptiles,” and so when he identified the three original dinosaurs in 1842, he left out Thecodontosaurus. Since the remains were fairly incomplete, and since no new specimens were found in the ensuing decades, geologists lost interest in Thecodontosaurus, except for Thomas Huxley, who in 1870 was the first to recognize it as a dinosaur.   Subsequently, with no new specimens found, Thecodontosaurus, Stutchbury, and Riley all but disappeared from the dinosaur historical record.  It did not help when many of the Thecodontosaurus specimens, including the type specimen, were destroyed when the Museum was bombed in 1940.

Leg bones of Thecodontosaurus found near Bristol, lithographed plate in “A description of various fossil remains of three distinct saurian animals, recently discovered in the Magnesian Conglomerate near Bristol," by Henry Riley and Samuel Stutchbury, Transactions of the Geological Society of London, plate 30, end of vol. 5, ser. 2, 1840. (Linda Hall Library)

As the citizens of Bristol will now tell you, leaving Thecodontosaurus out of the dinosaur story was a mistake. Thecodontosaurus was in fact the fourth dinosaur ever discovered, and its omission from the original triumvirate of founding dinosaurs needs to be corrected, they claim, and Stutchbury and Riley restored to the honor roll of early dinosaur discoverers. In Bristol, Thecodontosaurus is referred to as “the Bristol Dinosaur”, and we show here a photo of a life-size restoration in the Museum (sixth image). We note that Stutchbury’s dinosaur is no rival for T. rex, or even the massive Iguanodon, being only about 6 feet long from snout to tail. But it is a dinosaur. And the next time we do a dinosaur discovery exhibit, we will be sure to include mention of Stutchbury and his socketed-tooth saurian.

Full-sized model restoration of Thecodontosaurus in the Bristol Museum, from a video series called Gibble’s Globe (youtube.com)

I did find two helpful videos online; the first provided our image of the restoration in the Bristol Museum; the second is narrated by Michael Benton, the Bristol paleontologist who has done the most to reinvestigate and rehabilitate Thecodontosaurus.

Stutchbury passed away on Feb. 12, 1859, a very Darwinian day to die, as Darwin was born on Feb. 12, and the Origin of Species was published in 1859.  Stutchbury was buried in Arnosvale Cemetery in Bristol.

William B. Ashworth, Jr., Consultant for the History of Science, Linda Hall Library and Associate Professor emeritus, Department of History, University of Missouri-Kansas City. Comments or corrections are welcome; please direct to ashworthw@umkc.edu.