This article was first published in The Montreal Gazette.
The professor, wearing flowing robes and holding a skull in his hand, approached a student sitting in the front row. “What rules the world?” he asked. “I have no idea,” the terrified student muttered, to which the prof retorted: “The stomach, sir!”
Except for the attire and the skull, that little exchange could have taken place in my class, where we discuss the role that food and nutrition play in our lives. But that episode actually played out in the mid-19th-century at Oxford University, where William Buckland was professor of Geology. Obviously, his interests extended beyond rocks.
Let’s meet Buckland, one of the most colourful scientists I’ve ever come across. After all, how often do you get to talk about someone who is said to have eaten a king’s heart? But that is not where our story starts.
It begins with an ancient hyena den.
As a young man, Buckland fell in love with fossils, the preserved remains of ancient organisms. He was in his 30s when he investigated fossil bones found in a cave in Yorkshire and concluded that they were the remains of prehistoric hyenas. He believed that from their fossilized feces, for which he coined the term “coprolite,” one could determine what sort of animals the hyenas had eaten. Buckland went about proving this by feeding guinea pigs to a hyena and examining its poop, which he found to contain fragments of bone just like in the coprolites he had discovered.
He was so fascinated by these fossils that he commissioned a table to be made that featured an array of coprolites inlaid in its top. Buckland’s “poo table,” as it came to be called, can be seen in the Lyme Regis Museum in Dorset, England, a region rich in fossils.
This hyena coprolite discovery was deemed important enough for Buckland to be awarded the Copley Medal, the Royal Society of Britain’s most prestigious award, conferred “for sustained, outstanding, achievements in any field of science.” And more achievements were to come.
Buckland wrote the first full account of a dinosaur, even before the word “dinosaur” existed. In 1824, he published “Notice on the Megalosaurus or Great Fossil Lizard of Stonesfield” based on a fossilized partial jaw with a jutting tooth. The term “dinosaur,” from the Greek for “terrible lizard” would not be introduced until 1842 by British paleontologist Richard Owen. Fittingly, Buckland’s “great lizard” has been named “Megalosaurus bucklandi” and was even depicted on a 2024 United Kingdom stamp.
Buckland’s interest in the stomach was likely stirred by his coprolite studies, from which he concluded that such fossils could yield information both about the eater and the eaten. This led to some whacky dining experiments that resulted in William Buckland being remembered not only as a paleontologist of note, but also as a scientist with eccentric tendencies: He declared that he would eat his way through the animal kingdom. Hedgehogs, frogs, elephant trunk and earwigs made it on to his dinner table. He was fine with alligator soup and mice on toast, but he claimed that mole was the worst thing he ever tasted, at least until he tried “stewed bluebottle.” It isn’t clear whether he was referring to the fly or the jellyfish, both of which go by that name. I think we can believe him and take a pass.
Speculation has been that Buckland’s strange alimentary choices were not a result of eccentricity, but were motivated by the plight of the poor, who often did not have enough to eat. He thought that if his unusual choices were shown to be an acceptable part of the diet, the poor would have a cheap option. However, one would think that elephant trunk hardly falls into the economical food category.
If one had to come up with a headline for a story about Buckland’s most bizarre gustatory experience, “The Paleontologist’s Hearty Meal” would serve the purpose.
Although the account may well be apocryphal, it is too good not to tell. Let’s start with the part of the story that is historically accurate. In France since the 13th century, a dead king’s heart was removed and stored as a relic to be venerated. Such venerance was disdained after the outbreak of the French Revolution. The silver chest in which King Louis XIV’s heart was kept was melted down and the mummified organ supposedly sold to Alexander Pau, a painter who had an unusual use for it.
“Mummy brown” was a pigment made from ground-up mummies at the time and was particularly desirable because it offered accurate flesh tones. As the story goes, Pau used only a small piece of the mummified heart, and the rest, about the size of a walnut, was somehow acquired by Lord Harcourt, the Archbishop of York, who liked to show it around. That is just what he did at a lavish dinner at which Buckland was a guest. When the heart was passed to him, Buckland, who had already acquired a reputation for eating atypical foods, is said to have declared: “I have eaten many strange things, but I have never eaten the heart of a king before.” Thinking this peculiar delicacy would make a great addition to his repertoire, and partaking of it would entertain the guests, he is said to have proceeded to take a nibble. As I said, a story too good not to tell.
While the account is suspect, Buckland was known to be an entertaining lecturer. At Oxford, when he was teaching the students about his Megalasaurus, he would prance about, imitating how he thought the giant lizard walked. His colleagues were not enamoured by such antics, with one scoffing that “the grossness of the buffoonery acted on me like an emetic.” One suspects Lord Harcourt’s guests could have related to the emetic effect.
While Buckland could be described as, let us say, unconventional, there is no question that he made significant contributions to science. The dedication on his bust, on displayed at Westminster Abbey, states: “endued with superior intellect, he applied the powers of his mind to the advancement of science and the welfare of mankind.”
There is no mention of his hearty appetite.
