Robert Plot and Scrotum humanum: The Weird Early History of Paleontology

 

This post was originally published in Extinct:The Philosophy of Palaeontology blog in 2023 in a slightly different form. I am republishing it in my own blog with the permission of Max Dresow.

While paleontology studies all kinds of animals and plants that went extinct millions of years ago, it usually only garners recognition from the public by reporting on latest dinosaur discoveries. Particularly new mass and size records, caring for younglings, and whether our favorite dinosaurs were ferocious hunters or timid scavengers, tend to titillate the public at large. The possible return of Brontosaurus to scientific terminology was likewise a large news item a few years back.^[1]

Even though the sources are often scarce, latest research has been able to make several leaps forward, which has allowed rather accurate estimates of the coloring, existence of feathers, and social behavior based on the fossil material. Meanwhile, several old hypotheses, such as poikilothermy, obtuseness, and the role of evolutionary loser, have been pushed to history, most likely for good.^[2] Despite this, our understanding of these extinct creatures is, even at best, mostly educated guesswork and the final confirmation for many theories will probably never be reached.

However, the history of paleontology is also full of weird occurrences and events, especially in the early days when research was not as systematic and the description and possession of fossil material did not always fill the current requirements, to say the least. One of these oddities, which might have even changed the way we refer to certain dinosaurs, has to do with the first ever named genus of non-avian dinosaur. The story includes a missing fossil, speculation about giant humans, theorizing of procreating stones, and a possible dinosaur named after a human ball sack.^[3] Welcome to the weird history of paleontology.

Big Lizard in the Backyard

The first officially named genus of dinosaur is typically considered to be Megalosaurus, the Great Lizard (gr. megas, great and sauros, lizard), of which William Buckland (1784–1856) published a description in 1824. At the time, the term ‘dinosaur’ did not exist, and Buckland called the creature “an enormous fossil […] reptile”, speculating it being “an amphibious animal”.^[4] Today we know Megalosaurus to have been around 6 meter long, land-dwelling carnivorous theropod dinosaur.

Buckland’s estimation of the creature’s amphibious nature is understandable, as the previous identified fossil discoveries of large lizard animals were almost exclusively marine reptiles, now known to be distinct from archosaurian dinosaurs.^[5] Georges Cuvier (1769–1832), renown as the father of paleontology, stated in 1808 that the remains found in Maastricht, Neatherlands, belonged to a giant extinct water-dwelling monitor lizard, which Conybeare later named Mosasaurus.^[6] Fossil hunter and paleontological trail blazer Mary Anning (1799–1847) found the first full skeletal fossil of the fishlike Ichtyosaurus as a 12-year old, and in 1823 discovered another well-known marine reptile, Plesiosaurus (both named by Conybeare and Henry de la Beche, 1796–1855).^[7]

Such findings inspired scientists in theorizing how the earth was before a single human had stepped a foot on it, while similarly raising questions about the relations between different species. Although both Conybeare and Buckland were clergymen as well as geologists and denied evolutionary development between species’, the public expression of such questions created intellectual space for the thought that certain species might expire while others develop further.^[8]

Typical to the time, Buckland did not give the Megalosaurus fossil a specific name, naming only the genus. Megalosaurus did not get a type species before 1827 when Gideon Mantell (1790– 1852) included its remains among his geological study of southern-east part of England under the name Megalosaurus bucklandii (Buckland’s Great Lizard).^[9] 15 years later, Megalosaurus was one of three genus which Richard Owen (1804–1892) used to describe dinosauria in 1842 (the other two were Hylaeosaurus and Iguanadon, both named by Mantell), further inciting speculation that these creatures were not just large lizards but fully distinct animals (Owen, though, opposed the theory of evolution and considered it impossible for a creature to develop into another).^[10]

Depiction of two Megalosaurs by Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, c. 1862, based on ideas by Richard Owen. (Natural History Museum, London.)

A Bone to Pick with Dr. Plot

Fossils of extinct animals have, however, been found since as early has human recorded history. In ancient Greece, giant-size bones were taken to be the remains of legendary heroes and demigods. King Pelops’ lost shoulder blade was described to be massive and Herodotus (c. 484–435 BCE) reported that when the Spartans discovered the bones of Orestes, the son of King Agamemnon, his skeleton was over 10 feet high.^[11] Both are today considered to have belonged to large Pleistocene mammals, such as a mammoth or a mastodon. Stories of one-eyed cyclopes have been theorized to been inspired by Pleistocene dwarf elephant fossils of the Palaeoloxodon -genus, and extinct terrestrial and marine creatures have likely fed the stories about dragons, leviathans, and other monsters from ancient China to native American cultures to Medieval Europe.^[12]

The history of Megalosaurus similarly reaches all the way to the end of the 17^th century, being possibly the earliest (at least non-avian) dinosaur described in scientific literature. Its earliest known fossil, the lower part of a femur, was found in the Taynton Limestone Formation in Cornwall, England, in 1676. A year later, English naturalist and historian Robert Plot (1640–1696) described the fossil in his work Natural History of Oxfordshire (1677). The work was renowned in his own time and Plot received fame and accolades with it. He was elected to the Royal Society of London already in the work’s publication year and in 1684 he became the first professor of chemistry at the University of Oxford as well as the keeper of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.^[13]

A portrait of Robert Plot, painted by Sylvester Harding (1745-1809)

Plot did not consider most fossils to be the remains of living organisms, but instead mineral salts crystallized into coincidental shapes and forms. In the case of the Cornwall specimen, however, Plot recognized it correctly as a part of a femur and wrote on it at length, speculating the size of the bone and to what animal it might have belonged to. Despite the specimen being larger than the femurs of “both horses and oxen”^[14], Plot did not view it likely that the size would have increased during petrification. Some of Plot’s colleagues estimated that the femur could have belonged to an elephant “brought hither during the Government of Romans in Britain”^[15] but Plot did not find this a believable theory either (there were no sources in Plot’s time which would have indicated the romans to have brought elephants to Britain, and after comparing the specimen to a real elephant’s bones in 1676, he found there to be a significant difference between the two).^[16] Finally, Plot concluded that the bone belonged to a giant human, reminiscent of the Titans of Greek mythology, and used a few pages for describing the history of such mythical giants, including some from the lore of his own time, even mentioning a Dutch woman “seven foot and a half high, with all her limbs proportionable”^[17] that he had seen in Oxford. Such ponderings are fascinating to read as they give us some insight into how 17^th century people approached the discovery of physical evidence for paleontological material which they did not have the contemporary scientific worldview to appreciate (how Plot or his contemporaries thought about physical evidence for the existence of giant humans, up to “above seventeen feet high”, is impossible to say due to lack of evidence and a scientific worldview that is very alien to us today.).

About a hundred years later, another naturalist, Richard Brookes (fl. 1721–1764), added the Cornwell fossil described by Plot to the fifth volume of his work A New and Accurate System of Natural History (1763), concerning stones, fossils and minerals. The purpose of Brookes book, like the longer title (to which is added the Method in which Linnaeus has treated these subjects) suggests, was to use the binomial taxonomic system devised by Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778)^[18]] in classifying the curious stones and minerals found in England.

Brookes’s description of the fossil is brief, and he mostly repeats what “Dr. Plott” has to say on it.^[19] He also includes a drawing of the bone, which is clearly based on the one included in Plot’s book, only an inversion of it. However, for some odd reason, the picture of the fossil is included a description Scrotum Humanum over it, apparently because someone noticed that the fossil looks, and I am not kidding, like a scrotal sack with testicles. It is unclear who did this mistake; Brookes’s text, after all, follows Plot and recognizes the fossil “exactly resembling the lowermost part of the thigh-bone of a man”,^[20]  so why the text and the picture description differ is unclear. It is possible that the picture identification was an illustrator error; Brookes describes a paragraph before the Cornwell Fossil that “other stones have been found exactly representing the private parts of a man” and the illustrations are identified only by pagination number, so it is possible the illustrator got confused with what description the femur represented.^[21]

Regardless of how the misidentification happened, some later writers took the idea quite seriously. French philosopher and naturalist Jean-Baptiste Robinet (1735–1820), who is known for translating David Hume’s (1711–1776) Essays Moral and Political (1741), went as far as identifying musculature in each ‘testicle pouch’ and stating that the central cavity looks like an urethra in his Considerations philosohiques de la gradiation naturelle des formes (1768).^[22]

 

Cornwell fossil that Plot speculated to be of a giant human and was titled Scrotum Humanum in Brookes’s work due to looking like a scrotal sack. (Plot 1677, 142 and Brookes 1763, 318.) 

It is unlikely that Robinet ever saw the fossil itself (for reasons I discuss below), however, he must have known about the descriptions of Plot and Brookes as a petrified thigh bone (he quotes both rigorously in different parts of the work and the illustration of the specimen is clearly copied from Brookes^[23]), and yet he disregarded them. The reasoning behind this seems to be that Robinet had developed a vitalistic theory of the transmutation of species, somewhat based on the radical ideas of hylozoism of the 17^th century Cambridge Platonists in which all matter is alive and unified in systematic order. For Robinet, everything in the universe is animated, including not only plants and animals but also rocks and mineral, generated from pre-existing germs in a progressive sequence of events. Everything procreates, develops, assimilates. Fossils then were not once living organisms but formed organized bodies that developed from fossil germs, and thus, the Cornwell fossil in Robinet’s system could not have been a petrified bone of a once living creature but a stone formation sui generis that just resembles the bollocks of a human male.^[24]

Neither Robinet’s theory nor his findings of what appears as genital traces in the Cornwell fossil were widely accepted.^[25] However, they represented a wider discussion on whether several petrified animal forms and skeletons were once living animals or mere rocks and minerals formed in a certain way; a discussion, as we might recall, that was already going when the Cornwell fossil was described for the first time (even Plot did not consider all fossils to have been once living animals).^[26] Such discussions, as well as Robinet’s vitalistic theory, might seem foreign in the current scientific mindset, however, they were very much still an aspect of the science at the time and it was still a century later when evolutionary theory and further discoveries allowed scientists to recognize the Cornwell fossil’s true nature, with John Phillips (1800–1874) concluding that it “may have been the femur of a large megalosaurus or a small ceteosaurus” in 1871.^[27]

A Dinosaur by Any Other Name?

In 1970, paleontologist Beverly Halstead (1933–1991) published a paper in which he argued that as Brooke’s work was published after the 10^th edition Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae, considered the starting point of the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN), Scrotum humanum should be considered a perfectly valid binomen and therefore indicate the type specimen of a new biological genus. This would make it the first generic and specific name ever applied to a (non-avian) dinosaur. Moreover, since the name Scrotum humanum was given to the specimen first, by the rules of the ICZN, it has taxonomic priority over later names and is thus to be considered the species’ proper scientific name.^[28] This would mean that the first ever found dinosaur was not in fact called “Buckland’s Great Lizard” but was actually named… after a pair of human testicles.

The question whether the dinosaur species M. bucklandii should be called S. humanum went on some years. Halstead considered it irrelevant that Brookes had known that the fossil is not in fact of a petrified testicular sack and only the fact that Scrotum humanum had not been used in subsequent literature since 1899 (as the ICZN rules dictated) meant that it could be removed from priority and considered nomen oblitum (“forgotten name”).^[29] Justin Delair (1932–) & William Sarjeant (1935–2002) called this “perhaps fortunate”^[30] for obvious reasons; if Halstead would have been right, the picture above would probably need to be changed to depict a “pair of Scrotums”. However, the issue was apparently serious enough that when ICZN deleted the nomen oblitum clause in 1985 (potentially making Scrotum humanum a senior synonym of Megalosaurus bucklandii), Sarjeant made a formal application under his own and Halstead’s (who had deceased the year before) name to have Scrotum humanum technically suppressed so it would not usurp names possibly considered synonymous with it.^[31]

The ICZN then came to the conclusion that the fact that someone thought a part of a femur looks like human balls is a ridiculous way to name dinosaur species, pointed out that the words were likely descriptive (after all, they appear along such rigorous taxonomic ‘names’ as “Kidney Stone” and “Petrifaction”)^[32] and put an end to the whole affair by declaring the name nomen dubium (“dubious name”) having never been used as a scientific name, thus dropping it from taxonomy.^[33]

20^th century understanding of what Scrotum… I mean Megalosaurus possibly looked like. (Natural History Museum, London.)

Afterwards there has been some discussion whether stating the name to be a nomen dubium was the right call; it is unclear where the naming was in the first place done by Brookes, the descriptiveness of the words is suspect, and the name has indeed been used as a scientific name.^[34]] Nevertheless, no-one appears to be suggesting the reinstatement of S. humanum as a valid taxa, and the suggestions range more from whether the ‘name’ should be considered a nomen erratum (erroneously given name) or nomen nudum (naked name).^[35] Of course, that we came close to having a dinosaur named after a pair of gonads is too good of a joke for many scientists to pass, and Scrotum or Scrotum humanum is still often listed as either a junior synonym or nomen oblitum (which was reinstated in the ICZN code in 1999) of Megalosaurus.^[36]

Mystery of the Cornwell Fossil

But wait, one could now ask, what happened to the Cornwell fossil that Plot described in 1677 and was titled Scrotum Humanum in 1763? The fossil, unfortunately, is lost; no-one knows where it is or what happened to it, and the only record we have of its are the descriptions and pictures drawn.  

Title page of Dinosaur Bones by ‘Aliki’. (A & C Black, 1989. Reproduced, and given the rather unfortunate caption of ‘Little Girl and Scrotum humanum’, in Torrens 1995, 257.)

It is not completely clear when the Cornwell fossil got lost; it was possibly misplaced already when Brookes described it, as the picture is clearly copied from Plot. Thus, while I have stated that the Cornwell fossil was a Megalosaurus, the estimation is based on geological provenance and timescale (Middle-Jurassic, Bathhonian stage), as well as the picture and size description presented in Plot’s (and later Brookes’s) book, and while they are detailed enough to state that the fossil is mostly likely a megalosaur, final confirmation has not been made. (This was also one of the reasons ICZN considered Scrotum humanum a dubious name as its identification is insufficient.) Lately, the Cornwell fossil’s identity as a Megalosaurus has even been challenged and it might instead represent another megalosaurian dinosaur Torvosaurus, a close relative of Megalosaurus.^[37]

The Cornwell fossil is certainly not the only fossil that has been described and then misplaced. The other early English fossils that Plot refers to in his book are similarly lost. Plot’s successor at the Ashmolean Museum, Edward Lhuyd (c. 1660–1709) included in his Lithophylacii Britannici Icnographia (1699) two teeth which we now consider to have belonged to a megalosaur and a sauropod, both of which are likewise lost.^[38] In fact, the whereabouts of most early dinosaur fossils from 17^th and 18^th century, often due to loss, misplacement or misguided disposal, are currently unknown, making identification difficult (some that were thought lost have been rediscovered, yet a large amount are still missing).^[39] Misplacing of fossil record is also not just a bad habit left in the early modern scientific practice; the enormous incomplete dorsal vertebra that E. D. Cope (1840–1897) named Amphicoelias fragilimus in 1878, during his bitter rivalry with O. C. Marsh (1831–1899), has been missing at least since 1921 (although in its case the problem might have been disintegration rather than misplacement).^[40] The fossil remains of the first discovered Spinosaurus aegyptiacus, described in 1915 by Ernst Stromer (1871–1952),  had stayed intact for a hundred million years only to be bombed to smithereens by World War II bombing raids during the 1940s.^[41] But as the first described (non-avian) dinosaur bone, the Cornwell fossil might be the most famous and historically important missing fragment.

However, in late 2022, paleontologist Darren Naish made a post on his Tetrapod Zoology blog, concerning vertebrate paleo-life, regarding the Cornwell fossil. Naish is a well-known popularizer of evolutionary science and everything related to dinosaurs, especially in his blog where he amongst other topics has argued against ontogenetic morphing hypothesis (that certain genera of dinosaurs considered distinct were just different growth stages of another genus, which is related to the contention that, as Naish puts it, there were simply too many damn dinosaurs, or TMDD)^[42] and publicly criticized Brian J. Ford’s theory that all dinosaurs were aquatic (yes, all of them).^[43]  But Naish’s rapport on the Cornwell fossil had a different angle, as the caption read: “Have we discovered one of vertebrate palaeontology’s most famous ‘missing’ specimens?”^[44]

Naish, along with fellow zoologists Paul Stewart and Martin Simpson, later joined by the Collections Manager at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History Hilary Ketchum, had begun to suspect that the Cornwell fossil was not actually lost at all and had been hiding in plain sight the whole time, as part of the Robert Plot dedicated display in the Ashmolean Museum. The fossil in question, like the Cornwell fossil, is a distal end of a large femur, clearly belonging to a tetanuran dinosaur (clade that includes most common therapods), maybe even a megalosaur. The main difference from the Cornwell specimen was that the hollow interior, which Plot had described containing “a shining spar-like substance” (thinking it to be petrified marrow)^[45] was not visible, as a section of the shaft of the bone had been glued to the distal end. But even the crack where the two had been joined was in the exact right position to fit the illustration in Plot’s work. A lot of the visible details of the Ashmolean specimen matched Plot’s illustration as well (when flipped as a mirror image) and even the origin of the specimen was promising, old labeling revealing it to be from Enstone, which previously located a quarry within the borders of the parish of Cornwell.

The team first made rudimentary examinations of the Ashmolean specimen in 2020 (read: met up in the museum and stared at the Plot display), but it soon became clear that in order to identify whether the specimen is indeed the Cornwell fossil a more hands on approach was required. Plot’s description of the fossil was detailed, including size and weight estimates (15 inches around the shaft, 24 inches around the distal end and weighing almost 20 pound)^[46] but to test these, the specimen needed to be examined outside of the display case. Here Ketchum entered the picture, getting the team in contact with the right people for gaining access to the specimen itself.

Could this be the lost Cornwell fossil, think Darren Naish, Martin Simpson, and Paul Stewart? (Part of the Plot display at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, 2020. Photo: Darren Naish.)

The team then gathered in the Ashmolean to measure, weight and otherwise inspect the specimen and discovered… that it was not the Cornwell fossil after all. While the circumference measurements were roughly the same, the weight was only about half of Plot’s description, and the team did not think it worth it to break off the shaft from the rest to confirm whether the insides conferred with Plot’s observations. Sadly, the mystery of the Cornwell fossil remains unsolved.^[47]

But while the fossil itself remains lost, its significance and prominence still resonate. It represents one of the first recorded times humankind came across evidence that something ancient and huge was hiding in the rocks, that there were literal giants in the earth, and that the world we now know might not be the world as it has always been. Scientists in Plot’s time were perplexed by such discoveries, struggling to come up with adequate explanations, but it was the beginning of something, and beginnings hold a special fascination for limited beings such as ourselves.^[48]

A triassic scene by the water from The Big Golden Book of Dinosaurs by Christopher Santoro, written by Mary Elting. (Western Publishing Company, 1988.)

The whole Scrotum Humanum issue might have been, as Naish described it, “a silly waste of time”^[49] and Halstead’s original paper can be considered to have mostly been a jest, but it reveals something about how we approach the thought of a world that does not exist anymore. Plot and his fellows, like the ancient Greeks before them, saw the bones representing mythical giants because they expected to find traces of such giants inhabiting the earth once. The scientific paradigm shift of the early 1800’s, driven by people like Darwin, Cuvier, Anning, Buckland, Owen, and Mandell, was enormous, and it is difficult to appreciate it in all its aspects. Even today, new dinosaur discoveries create interest and wondering. One can only imagine how people back then took the revealing that the world had once been populated by strange reptilian giants. Here poetry, like Joseph Victor von Scheffel’s (1826–1886) “Der Ichthyosaurus,” may help our limping imaginations (translated by Charles Godfrey Leland, 1824–1903).

The rushes are strangely rustling,

The ocean uncannily gleams,

As with tears in his eyes down gushing,

An Ichthyosaurus swims.

'The Plesiosaurus, the elder, 

Goes roaring about on a spree; 

The Plerodactylus even 

Comes flying as drunk as can be. 

The end of the world is coming, 

Things can't go on long in this way; 

The Lias formation can't stand it, 

Is all that I've got to say!' 

And this petrifideal ditty? 

Who was it this song did write? 

Twas found as a fossil album leaf 

Upon a coprolite.

Henry De la Beche, Duria Antiquoir - a more ancient Dorset (1830) 

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^[1] See e.g., Charles Choi, “The Brontosaurus Is Back”, Scientific American, 7/iv/2015. See also Forsman 2015.^↩

^[2] Discussions of thermoregulation still continue but only a few support the idea today that all, or even a large amount of dinosaurs, would have been “coldblooded”. See e.g., Bakker 1986; Switek 2013; Hone 2016; Prothero 2019.^↩

^[3] One of the hypotheses that has been pushed to history as untrue is that dinosaurs are extinct as current-day birds are still living dinosaurs. The theory that birds evolved from dinosaurs was developed already in the 1860s, after the remains of birdlike Archaeopteryx litographica were discovered, but was overtaken by theories of designed evolution which considered dinosaur extinction resulting from failing as a species (see Bakker 1986, 15–20). Henceforth, when I refer to dinosaurs in this text, I mean it exclusively as non-avian dinosaurs (discounting current day birds).^↩

^[4] Buckland 1824, 390, 392. Buckland gives partial credit for the name also to William Conybeare (1787–1857). The name  Megalosaurus was first suggested by James Parkinson (1755–1824). Parkinson 1822, 298. Cf. Paul 1988, 281.^↩

^[5] Even flying pterosaurs, of which remains had been found since late 1700’s, were originally considered to be marine animals due to it being considered more likely for unknown species to live in the ocean depths. See Collini 1784. Cf. Taquet & Padian 2004; Ösi, Prondavai & Géczy 2010.^↩

^[6] McGowan 2001, 88. At the time, predominant scientific view was that animals do not go extinct as it would be against the great chain of being, in which all created beings are in perfect harmony. Extinction would cause missing links in that chain and be against natural order. Cuvier was one of the earliest supporters of extinction theory but was met with opposition through-out his life. One of his opponents was Jean-Baptiste Lamarcke (1744–1829) who expressed that instead of going extinct, the species evolve into other species over time, which Cuvier opposed. Darwin’s theory of natural selection then explained that extinction and evolution could be mutually inclusive.^↩

^[7] Ibid,9. Anning was excluded outside of the academic research of her time due to her gender, even though she was typically more deeply acquainted with the fossil findings she had made than the academics who published research papers on them, often without even mentioning her name. See ibid, 11–27 ^↩

^[8] Ibid, 10. Even though he spent most of his research life among fossilized remains, Buckland himself was not one. He is described as a lively and entertaining lecturer, suddenly dashing towards his students waving a hyena skull and shouting “What rules the world?” (The answer Buckland was expecting was “the stomach, sir”.) Ibid, 29.^↩

^[9] Mantell 1827, 67.^↩

^[10] Owen 1832, 102–103. Cf. Dean 1999, 13–14.^↩

^[11] Paus.5.13; Hdt. 1.68. See Mayor 2000, chapter 3.^↩

^[12] See McGowan 2001, 1; Prothero 2019, 3; for a detailed look at early fossils, see Spalding and Sarjeant 2012.^↩

^[13] Ashmolean is the oldest public museum in the world, established in 1677 in Oxford to house items donated for the university by Elias Ashmole, including the stuffed body of the last dodo that was seen in Europe. Currently, the dodo, as well as the remains that Buckland named Megalosaurus, are exhibited at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History. It seems that gaining sufficient funding in academia was just as difficult in the 1600’s as it is today and it is possible that Plot worked simultaneously as a professor and as a curator as the payment from each was not enough to support him solely.^↩

^[14] Plot 1677, 132.^↩

^[15] Ibid, 133.^↩

^[16] Ibid, 133–136.^↩

^[17] Ibid, 138.^↩

^[18] Although a system close to what is now known as bionomial nomenclature was already developed by Swiss brothers Johann (1541–1613) and Gaspard (1560–1624) Bauhin for botanical work around a century earlier, Linnaeus was the first to systematically use a binomial taxonomy in his book Systema Naturae (1^st ed. 1736, 10^th ed. 1758). For this, Linnaeus is still known as ‘the father of modern taxonomy’.^↩

^[19] Brookes 1763, 317–318. As an interesting side note, while the Cornwell fossil, as far as we know, is the first dinosaur discovery to be described, it was not the first enormous fossil discovered in England. Plot refers to two large teeth found in Essex during the reign of Richard the First (1157–1199), and lists several other outsized bones and teeth found in various parts of England (Plot 1677, 134–135). One such discovery was made in 1666 in London, when upon pulling down the St. Mary Woolchurch, which had been badly damaged in the Great Fire of London, a thigh-bone “much bigger and longer than ours of stone could in proportion be, had it been entire” was found (ibid, 135; cf. Brookes 1763, 318). Plot took this as more evidence that these were human remains since “how Elephants should come to be buried in Churches is a question not easily answered, except we will run to so groundless a shift, as to say, that possibly the Elephants might be there buried before Christianity flourished in Britan and that these Churches were afterward casually built over them” (Plot 1677, 315). Plot is obviously mocking, yet he was closer to the truth than he even realized. See also Sam Kriss, “Jurassic Lark”, First Things, iii/2023.^↩

^[20] Brookes 1763, 317.^↩

^[21] Ibid. See Rieppel 2022, 941. Norman (1992, 173–174) calls it an “editorial error”.^↩

^[22] Robinet 1768, 31. See also Buffetaut 1979 & Rieppel 2022.^↩

^[23] Robinet 1768, 19–20, Pl. 1, fig. 1. See Buffetaut 1979, 82.^↩

^[24] Robinet 1766, 209–210; 1768, 31. See Rieppel 2022, 942, 945.^↩

^[25] Though unlike Delair and Sarjeant (2002, 186) claim, Robinet did not consider thefossil to actually be a scrotum.^↩

^[26] See esp. Rieppel 2022, 944.^↩

^[27] Phillips 1871, 164. Cf. Delair & Sarjeant 1975, 8; Rieppel 2022, 941.^↩

^[28] Halstead 1970^↩

^[29] Ibid.^↩

^[30] Delair& Sarjeant 1975, 8.^↩

^[31] Halstead& Sarjeant 1993.^↩

^[32] Brookes 1763, 318.^↩

^[33] Halstead & Sarjeant 1993. See also Delair & Sarjeant 2002; Spalding & Sarjeant 2012, 10; Prothero 2019, 6–7.^↩

^[34] See e.g., Molnar, Kurnzanov & Dong (1990, 192) who list Scrotum humanum as a dubious yet distinct carnosaur.^↩

^[35] Rieppel 2021, 945; Mortimer, Mickey, “‘Scrotum humanum’ a torvosaur and Jurassic Chinese theropod updates”, The Theropod Database, 9/i/2023.^↩

^[36] See e.g., Paul 1988, 280–281. For more on taxonomic priority relating to the infamous Brontosaurus vs. Apatosaurus case, see Forsman 2015. Scientific rigidity almost came to bite paleontologists on the backside when in 2000 it was confirmed that Tyrannosaurus rex, one of the most recognized and beloved dinosaur species, had already been named Manospondylus gigas by Cope in 1892, full 13 years before “King Tyrant Lizard”. See Larson 2008, 37–38, 50; Prothero 2019, 224. Cf. Osborn 1905; 1916. Instead of following priority, most referred to the changed ICZN ruling from 1^st of January 2000, stating that a name that has been considered valid for 50 years cannot be replaced by a name that has been considered invalid during the same time, and quickly changed the subject. Mike Taylor, “So why hasn’t Tyrannosaurus been renamed Manospondylus”, Miketaylor.org, 27/viii/2002; Matt Martyniuk, “Whatis a Nomen Oblitum? Not What You Probably Think”, DinoGoss, 5/ix/2010. By the writing of this article, no-one appears to have made an official application for protecting the T. rex name and the case seems to have been shoved under a rug.^↩

^[37] Delair & Serjeant 1975, 8; Rieppel 2022, 941; Mortimer 2023. The fossil cannot be the type species T. tanneri as it is from the later Callovian stage of Jurassic. Megalosaurus and its clade megalosauridae, due to being viewed as an archetypal carnosaur, have though been treated as kind of a “wastebasket” for partial descriptions and unidentified mid-size theropod dinosaur discoveries. As such Megalosaurus has at one point or another included hundreds of sub-species from five different continents, spanning 100 million years, with several of these sub-species’ been granted their own genus (including Carcharodontosaurus and Dilophosaurus). See Paul 1988, 281–282; Prothero 2019, 13.^↩

^[38] Llhuyd 1699, pl. 16. Reproduced in Delair & Sarjeant 2002, 186–187. Cf. Delair& Sarjeant 1975, 8.^↩

^[39] For a catalogue of these early fossils, pre-dating Buckland’s Megalosaurus specimen, see Delair & Sarjeant 1975, 8–12; 2002, 186–192. Cf. Spalding & Sarjeant 2012, 11–13; Prothero 2019, 5.^↩

^[40] See Osborn & Mook 1921, 279; Carpenter 2006, 134; Woodroff & Foster 2014. See also Forsman 2015. Due to the fossil material being lost, most of Cope’s size estimations, which would have placed Amphicoelias the largest vertebrate that has ever existed, have been discarded as exaggerated. In 2018, A. fragillimus was renamed Maraapunisaurus fragillimus due to taxonomic relocation (Carpenter 2018), rekindling new size estimations placing it again amongst largest known sauropods. See Paul 2019.^↩

^[41] Prothero2019, 207–208.^↩

^[42] “StopSaying That There Are Too Many Sauropod Dinosaurs”, TetZoo 17/iv/2020. Cf. Prothero 2019, 109–111.^↩

^[43] See Naish 2012; 2018. Cf. Ford, “A prehistoric revolution”, Laboratory News, 3/iv/2012; 2018. My favourite part of Naish’s answer is the following: "Ford specifically stated that the tails of large dinosaurs were too heavy to permit terrestrial life. However, geometrical modelling performed by dinosaur specialists and utilising techniques somewhat more rigorous than Ford's technique of dunking toy dinosaurs in water most definitely does not find even the most substantial, most muscular dinosaurian tail to present any problem as goes terrestrial locomotion.” Naish 2012, 32.^↩

^[44] “Robert Plot’s Lost Dinosaur Bone”,  TetZoo, 16/xii/2022.^↩

^[45] Plot 1677, 131.^↩

^[46] Ibid, 131–132.^↩

^[47] “Robert Plot’s Lost Dinosaur Bone”, TetZoo, 16/xii/2022.^↩

^[48] Cornwell fossil is not the only example here, a giant neogenic salamander Andrias scheuchzeri was originally described as Homo diluvia testis (“Human who witnessed the Flood”) by Johann Jakob Scheuchzer (1672–1733) in 1726. See Prothero 2019, 4. Interestingly, no-one seems to have argued for the priority of the name, or claimed that a certain Pleistocene mammal should be renamed Orestes^↩.

^[49] “Robert Plot’s Lost Dinosaur Bone”,  TetZoo, 16/xii/2022.^↩