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| Mantellisaurus atherfieldensis |
Forget the cool, windswept English coastline of today. This was a warm, subtropical world of broad rivers, oxbow lakes and sprawling wetlands, where towering conifers, cycads and tree ferns sheltered one of Europe's richest dinosaur ecosystems.
Early flowering plants were just beginning to appear, while insects buzzed through the forests and reptiles called across the floodplains.
Here, herds of Mantellisaurus atherfieldensis browsed on tender vegetation. At seven to eight metres (23–26 feet) long, these elegant herbivores were among the largest animals in their world.
Their long hind limbs suggest they could move surprisingly quickly when needed—particularly if a hungry Neovenator emerged from the trees.
Nothing encourages cardio quite like becoming someone else's lunch.
Its hands were every bit as remarkable as the rest of the animal. Projecting from each was a formidable thumb spike. Victorian artists loved depicting these dinosaurs charging into battle like armoured knights, but the reality was likely less theatrical.
The elongated fifth finger tells another story. Unlike the stout thumb, it was surprisingly flexible, capable of curling around branches to draw foliage closer—a wonderfully delicate adaptation for an animal weighing well over a tonne.
This specimen was discovered in 1914 by geologist Reginald Walter Hooley in the Upper Vectis Formation near Atherfield on the Isle of Wight.
Described in 1917 and formally named Iguanodon atherfieldensis in 1925, it spent more than eighty years as a member of the ever-growing Iguanodon family.
That changed in 2007, when American palaeoartist and researcher Gregory S. Paul recognised that it was something quite different.
More lightly built, with longer limbs and closer evolutionary ties to the African iguanodontian Ouranosaurus, it deserved a genus of its own. Paul named it Mantellisaurus, honouring Dr Gideon Algernon Mantell, the Sussex physician whose discoveries helped launch the science of dinosaurs.
Mantell's story is one of brilliance, perseverance and one of Victorian science's greatest rivalries.
In 1822, he described Iguanodon, only the second dinosaur ever scientifically named.
Mantell spent decades collecting fossils and championing these extraordinary animals, only to find himself increasingly at odds with the formidable anatomist Sir Richard Owen.
Owen coined the word Dinosauria and later became the driving force behind London's Natural History Museum, but he also had a habit of eclipsing rivals—and few felt that more keenly than Mantell. The two men disagreed about almost everything, from dinosaur anatomy to broader questions of evolution, as they emerged in Victorian science.
Mantell increasingly recognised that these animals were active, lightly built and far more dynamic than giant lizards. Owen preferred to reconstruct them as slow, heavily built, rhinoceros-like reptiles that fit comfortably within his creationist view of nature.
When Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins created the famous Crystal Palace dinosaurs during the 1850s, it was Owen's interpretation that guided the sculptures.
Visitors marvelled at enormous reptilian beasts, including an Iguanodon sporting what appeared to be a horn proudly perched upon its nose.
As science advanced—and as more complete skeletons were discovered, particularly the spectacular Bernissart specimens from Belgium—we learned that the famous "horn" was, in fact, the thumb spike.
One of the most iconic mistakes in palaeontology had become one of its best-known corrections.
