The Amazing Story of William Buckland – The dinosaur genius had an appetite for destruction

The quest to solve this planet’s greatest mysteries obviously took a toll on their mental faculties.

Or maybe they needed to be more than a little weird to approach life’s puzzles from a different angle.

History has kindly called them eccentrics, although their actions indicate more serious suffering.

In their search for answers, some have also shown a total disregard for their own physical well-being.

Sir Isaac Newton, the 17th century polymath, was not a grounded individual, despite discovering the laws of gravity. Those who dealt with the genius quickly concluded that he lived on another planet. And not necessarily in our galaxy.

He avoided interaction with others, and in the process of getting out of bed, he would look down at his feet, then lose himself in a deep fog of thought.

Newton would remain seated on the bed, eyes fixed on his thin limbs, for the rest of the day.

He once stood up long enough to almost give himself a lobotomy. In an attempt to discover how our eyes perceive colour, Newton drove a bodkin – a large sewing needle – “between my eye and my bone as close as I could to the back of the eye”.

Following the potentially lethal experiment, Newton noted that he experienced spots in front of his eyes.

You and I could have predicted the outcome.

Sir Isaac, a man whose most cherished eureka moment was inspired by a falling apple, was “off the wall”.

But when it comes to maverick-minded geniuses, he couldn’t hold a candle to revered West Midlands fossil hunter William Buckland.

Yes, the work of the man from Coalbrookdale, Shropshire, across the Black County and the Lickey Hills has reshaped our understanding of life.

Yes, he almost discovered the dinosaurs by digging up the first bones. Rex is history.

However, it cannot be denied that Buckland, the Dean of Westminster, was strange. Some may use the politically incorrect phrase, “lunatics.”

And his disturbed table manners marked Buckland as mad. The boffin was a culinary car crash who believed he had to really understand the living creatures you had to eat.

All.

He sucked up everything in his path. For him, Noah’s Ark was not a biblical story, it was a “special painting”.

Fervently religious, he took Genesis 9:3 literally: “Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you.”

And the dean who had an appetite for destruction claimed to be able to swallow any type of creature, large or small.

I think he had a giraffe.