THE MID SUSSEX TIMES - TUESDAY JULY 16 1889

To the Editor of THE MID SUSSEX TIMES

The Committee of the Cuckfield Flower Show has this year added another attraction to the exhibition, which was already of a varied character, by offering a prize for the best collection of fossils. This very commendable step naturally draws attention to the Cuckfield fossil, which I should like to introduce to such of your readers as are not already acquainted with it.

I say advisedly “the Cuckfield fossil” because although there is an abundance of fossils to be found in our district, there is one in particular which is of far more interest and importance than the rest, and which was first unearthed and made known to science at Cuckfield, namely the Iguanodon. It came to light in the following manner.

Large numbers of what were taken for long bodied pebbles, each with one sharp end, used to be excavated from some stone quarries opposite Mill Hall a little to the east of the existing pit, and were used for mending the roads.

Had there been in those days the Flower Show Committee which had led people to discern and respect fossils, the teeth and question, for that is what the pebbles really were, would have been carefully preserved. Nobody, however, had the slightest idea of the real character or interest which belonged to them until Mrs Mantell, the wife of the famous Sussex geologist, was casually led to examine one, and asked what it was. No answer to this question being forthcoming, the object was sent to the illustrious French naturalist Cuvier who pronounced it to be a tooth of a rhinoceros long since deceased. It will be remembered that up to about 50 years ago but very little knowledge of extinct animals had been acquired. It was pointed out that no rhinoceros could have grown any such a tooth, whereupon Cuvier, with the sincere and single-minded devotion to truth which marks any real man of science, immediately admitted that his first impression had been erroneous.

Subsequently, in one of his books, he took occasion to give due credit to Dr Mantell, who by that time had indisputably made out the real character and personality of the animal to which the tooth had belonged.

The steps by which this discovery was reached would be too long to detail here. It must suffice to say that the animal was found to have been a member of the family which is represented nowadays by the iguanas, a tribe of lizards of which there are some hundreds of varieties of very different sizes, and almost all of them denizens of South America or of the West Indies. Any book of natural history will supply full information as to these. "Iguanodon" means, or is intended to mean, "toothed like the iguanas.” Geologists, and more particularly the people who make a study of extinct animals of former times, and who are called "Palaeontologists," were now put upon the alert, and the result was that almost all the bits required to furnish the complete framework of an iguanodon were gradually discovered, and the shape, look, size, and habits of the creature were clearly determined.

If you go into one of the ground floor side rooms to the right of the entrance of the South Kensington Natural History museum, you will see a piece of Cuckfield in the shape of a slab from the Whiteman's Green quarries, containing a quantity of bones from the broadest portion of the tail of the iguanodon nearly as perfect and fresh as when they formed a part of the living structure.

In the same case, and in the adjoining ones, bones are to be seen, some from Tilgate Forest, others from elsewhere in England, and others from Belgium, representing all, or nearly all the rest of the skeleton of an Iguanodon; and drawings are exhibited showing what the proprietor of such bones was like as a whole, and in the flesh. These portraits, although not indeed made of anyone particular individual, are as certainly faithful representations of iguanodons, generally, as if they had been photographs.

From these it appears that the animal had four legs, but that its two high ones were so much longer than those in front that it usually assumed the attitude of a kangaroo.

It was so tall that if a fine individual of the species had chosen to sit alongside of Cuckfield church, it might, perhaps, have been able to rest its chin on the parapet of the tower whence the spire rises, whilst its tail, covered, by the rest of its body, with great scales, would have run out some yards backwards – perhaps even far enough for the boys at the National School to deal irreverently with its tip without venturing outside their own territory.

In the days of iguanodons, however, no creatures of the kind can have ever resorted to the spot which is now Cuckfield churchyard, because in those times, some indefinite number of ages before human history began, Cuckfield, as will be mentioned presently, was undoubtedly at the bottom of the sea. To return to our big lizard.

It had a long, narrow, head at the end of a lanky neck on which it was set like a camels, and its nose was provided with a strong and hooked beak resembling that of a parrot, which enabled it to get a firm grip of the leaves, small branches tough ferns, and grasses (for it was distinctly a vegetarian) on which it subsisted. It was equipped both with sharp and with blunt teeth for the two purposes of biting and masticating, and it was furnished with arrangements whereby these teeth, as they got worn by work, were continually made good again.

Much has been written on the subject of these contrivances by Professor Owen and others, but the account of them, though very curious and interesting, would be too long, however closely condensed, to be given here.

One more peculiarity of the animal should be mentioned. Its hind feet were each formed of three monstrous toes, upon which it walked about, forming, no doubt, a spectacle of queer impressiveness.

The sand and mud which iguanodons had traversed became in many instances hardened by some means or other before the impressions of the three huge toes had been obliterated, and naturally enough it used to be supposed that the tracks must be those of some prodigious bird. But the slabs presenting those marks which are exhibited at the South Kensington Museum, with such feet as are exactly calculated to make these marks, by their side, show clearly enough that it was no bird, but one of these heavy gated lizards, which left this everlasting record of one of its casual strolls over soft territory.

It has been already mentioned that iguanodons were all together of the vegetarian persuasion, and thus of course, the question immediately occurs – how did they and other gigantic animals which must have necessarily have made severe demands on the forage producing capabilities of any district for the sustentation of their colossal frames, and the satisfaction of their aldermanic voracity, contrive to get sufficient provender in Sussex?

As everybody knows, bones of elephants are found at Cuckfield and in very large numbers at Brighton, in the cliffs on which Kemp Town is built. An elephant, no doubt, however burly he may be, is but a trumpery little affair as compared with an iguanodon, or with many other of the monsters of past times. Still, one of the puny elephants of these days, such as one sees at the zoological Gardens, gets through some surprising quantity – I forget what - of hay in the course of the year, although his appetite cannot be supposed to be as rampant as when he is roving about his native wild. Besides which he absorbs a perpetual stream of buns, swelling to a torrent on Bank holidays, which flows into his mouth kept permanently agape to receive it. But rapid growth and luxuriance of vegetation, such as is required to meet the wants of elephants and other wholesale consumers, absolutely demands tropical heat and moisture.

Anyone can see that this is so,. For observe, for example the great grasses, the bamboos, in the Palm House at Kew, going up almost like a rocket, or like the Beanstalk in "Jack and the Beanstalk," since, when at home, they grow 100 feet in a season, and then look at the same family – the grasses – as seen in Sussex, where the larger specimen serves only for hay or pasture, while the smaller ones cover the south downs with herbage of scarcely longer fibre than that of green baize.

Or, to take to extremes, contrast the exuberant growth and vivid colouring of the ground leaves of the Bananas, which are the commonest examples of tropical plants, with the lean and wizened lichens of high latitude, appearing as faint green smears upon the rocks, and barely enlarging their borders by a hairsbreadth in a century. The answer, no doubt, to the riddle as to where the Iguanodons and their compeers got their food is that they lived and died in a warm country which Sussex probably never was, and only came northwards after their decease. And how did they then come? Doubtless by water. For all this part of England then formed the bed of the estuary of a vast river which ran down from the tropics. Many of the the dead bodies of these great animals naturally fell into the stream, or into some one or other of it’s many affluents, and after floating down a long distance, eventually ran aground on the mud, sands, or shallows of the great estuary. And there they reposed for an unknown number of ages, destined to reappear eventually in little fragments, at the local flower shows, or the Chichester Museum.

Mid Sussex is a happy hunting ground for fossil collectors, since it is a cemetery of deceased monsters some of which are quite a curious as the Iguanodon and whose size they rival or excel. And since none of these has been so completely brought back upon the scene as the Iguanodon, there is a demand for the further information which it may fall within the power of any intelligent and lucky collector of fossils to supply.

One observation may, in conclusion, be made on the subject of collecting fossils. Fossils have an eloquence of their own which is almost fascinating for those who have learnt the historical language which they may be said to speak. To such persons fossil collecting is a worthy enterprise. But merely to amass old bones, without a purpose, without any knowledge of what they are, or any power of interpreting what they have to tell, seems to be about as dreary a pursuit as anybody of weak intellect could by possibility follow.

I am, Sir,

Your obedient servant, 

T.W.ERLE

Milhall,

July 19th 1889