Amazing story of William Buckland – Dinosaur genius had an appetite for destruction
Many of the great minds who shaped the world we live in today had a fairly loose grip on sanity.
The quest to solve this planet’s greatest mysteries evidently took its toll on their mental faculties.
Or perhaps they had to be more than a little strange to approach life’s puzzles from a different angle.
History has kindly dubbed them eccentrics, although their actions point to more severe afflictions.
In the search for answers, some also showed 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 he resided on another planet. And not necessarily in our galaxy.
He shunned interaction with others and would, in the process of getting out of bed, stare at his legs, then become lost in a fog of deep thinking.
Newton would remain seated on the bed, eyes trained on his thin limbs, for the rest of the day.
He once rose long enough to perform a near lobotomy on himself. In an attempt to discover how our eyes perceive colour, Newton drove a bodkin – a large sewing needle – “betwixt my eye and bone as near to the backside of my eye as I could”.
Following the potentially lethal experiment, Newton observed he experienced spots before his eyes.
You and I could’ve predicted that result.
Sir Isaac, a man whose most acclaimed eureka moment was inspired by a falling apple, was “off the wall”.
But when it comes to geniuses with maverick minds, he couldn’t hold a candle to revered West Midlands fossil hunter William Buckland.
Yes, the man’s work at Coalbrookdale, Shropshire, throughout the Black County and on the Lickey Hills re-shaped our understanding of life.
Yes, he pretty much discovered dinosaurs by unearthing the first bones. The Rex is history.
There is, however, no denying Buckland, Dean of Westminster, was weird. Some may use the politically incorrect expression, “bonkers”.
And it was his deranged habits at the dining table that marked Buckland as mad. The boffin was a culinary car crash who believed to truly understand living creatures you had to eat them.
All of them.
He hoovered up everything in his path. To him, Noah’s Ark wasn’t a Biblical story, it was a “specials board”.
Fiercely religious, he took Genesis 9:3 literally: “Every moving thing that lives will be food for you.”
And the Dean who possessed an appetite for destruction claimed to have succeeded in swallowing every type of creature, great or small.
I think he was having a giraffe.
