GIDEON MARYANN MANTELL Gideon Mantell 1790 1852 was

GIDEON & MARYANN MANTELL Gideon Mantell (1790 -1852) was a British physician and natural historian

GIDEON & MARYANN MANTELL: . Gideon Mantell (1790 -1852) was a British physician and natural historian. Like many medical men of his time, Mantell was deeply interested in geology and natural history. He is credited with the discovery of the remains of a large, fossil reptile resembling in some ways the modern iguana, which he named Iguanodon. Mantell's fossil was, after Buckland's Megalosaurus, the second large fossil reptile discovered and named, but Iguanodon was, if anything, even more striking to Mantell's contemporaries than was Buckland's find because Iguanodon's teeth suggested that it was herbivorous. All of the largest modern reptiles (e. g. , crocodiles, anacondas, komodo lizards) are carnivores, as was Megalosaurus, but Iguanodon was the first known large reptile that ate plants, and for this reason, it caused quite a stir in scientific circles. Actually it was Gideon's wife, Mary. Ann, who found the first Iguanodon material. She had gone with her husband to Surrey to take a spring ride in the country while Gideon visited a patient. On her ride she noticed some strange toothshaped fossils in the gravel with which the road had recently been paved. She took these to show Gideon, and he was so intrigued by them, that he spent years searching local rock quarries for more specimens. The picture at left is a contemporary print of fossil bones being removed from a Surrey quarry. Mantell spent more time at England's universities and museums, and in correspondence with the leading scientists of the day