Gideon Algernon Mantell

Gideon Algernon Mantell (1790–1852) was an English surgeon and geologist from Lewes in Sussex, the son of a shoemaker. Practicing medicine by day, he spent his spare hours collecting fossils in the Weald, and in 1822 he described the teeth of a huge herbivorous reptile he named Iguanodon, one of the first dinosaurs to be identified. He went on to discover Hylaeosaurus and to show that the Wealden rocks had been laid down in fresh water. His marriage failed and a carriage accident left him in constant pain, but his popular books, including The Wonders of Geology and The Medals of Creation, brought the new science to a wide public.