William Buckland, English Paleontologist
Buckland giving a lecture on fossils and displaying some of his prize specimens. The long-beaked skull at the front is an Ichthyosaur, a marine reptile that belonged to a separate group from the dinosaurs. William Buckland (March 12, 1784 - August, 14 1856) the English geologist and paleontologist who wrote the first full account of a fossil dinosaur, which he called "megalosaurus," or "great lizard." He was a pioneer in the use of fossilized feces, for which he coined the term coprolites, to reconstruct ancient ecosystems. Buckland was a proponent of the Gap Theory that interpreted the biblical account of Genesis as referring to two separate episodes of creation separated by a lengthy period, Early in his career he believed that he had found geologic evidence of the biblical flood, but later became convinced that the glaciation theory of Louis Agassiz provided a better the end of 1849, he contracted a disease which increasingly disabled him until his death in 1856 at the age of 72. Post-mortem examination identified a tubercular infection of the upper cervical vertebrae which had spread to the brain.
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