The Man who Missed the Dinosaurs

This week I shall be delighted to renew acquaintance with an old friend, William Smith, one of the first scientists I investigated for my series Local Heroes. He is the star of Mapman (xxx, yyy, zzz); by sheer observation and enterprise he became known as ‘the father of English geology’.

William ‘Strata’ Smith was born in 1769, one of those Eureka Years (radio 4 on xxxday). As a lad he was an enthusiastic fossil hunter; he went on to become a civil engineer and builder of canals. As he travelled about surveying and cutting canals, he collected fossils from the rocks, and could not help noticing that the rocks were often in layers.

He realised two important things. First he was able to identify rocks by the types of fossils embedded in them; so he might find one type of ammonite in Oxford clay but a different type in a different rock - as he himself said, ‘each stratum contained organized fossils peculiar to itself’. Second, in general when rocks were clearly in layers, the oldest layers were at the bottom, because they must have been laid down first.

The rock known as Oxford clay was laid down in the Upper Jurassic period, 150 million years ago, while dinosaurs prowled the Earth – think Jurassic Park. But in spite of his interest in fossils, Smith never knew about dinosaurs – indeed the word ‘dinosaur’ was not invented until three years after he died.

Oxford clay was originally found and named in Oxford, but Smith found the same stuff in the cliffs of Scarborough, and he deduced that some layers of rock must stretch for miles or even hundreds of miles across the country. He decided the way to keep track of them was by drawing a map, a geological map of England and Wales. This masterpiece was published in 1815.

The elegant Rotunda Museum at Scarborough was built to display Smith’s collection of 2000 fossils, with the oldest ones at the bottom, as in the rocks. Sadly he had spent all his money on the map, and his fossils had to be sold to the British Museum; so the lovely glass cases in the Rotunda Museum are empty. But his map changed forever the way scientists thought about the rocks beneath their feet, and inspired many a geologist, including the splendid Wild Bill Buckland – but that’s another story...

Page last updated: Friday, 22 July 2005 22:35

Radio Times articles, from 2003-2005

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The Man who Missed the Dinosaurs