Gideon Mantell

Gideon Mantell was an English obstetrician, geologist and paleontologist whose work on a set of large fossil teeth found in 1822 helped begin the scientific study of dinosaurs. Mantell recognized that the teeth, found in Cretaceous rock in southern England, resembled those of a living iguana but were roughly twenty times larger, and though the French anatomist Georges Cuvier initially misidentified similar fossil material as belonging to a rhinoceros, by 1825 Mantell's identification of a previously unknown giant reptile had been accepted. Mantell's colleague William Daniel Conybeare suggested the name Iguanodon for the new animal, in place of Mantell's own proposed name Iguana-saurus, and Mantell went on to describe and help identify several further dinosaur genera; at the time of his death in 1852 he was credited with having discovered four of the five dinosaur genera then known to science. Mantell also carried out extensive geological work on the Cretaceous rock formations of southern England, publishing detailed studies of the region's strata alongside his paleontological research.