Name: William Buckland: The man who tried to eat every animal on Earth| BBC Ideas
Uploaded: 2025-07-17T08:56:35.000Z
Duration: 4 min 5 s
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It's the 1830s, and you're invited to dinner at the home of one of Britain's most celebrated scientists.

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You take the only chair that isn't piled high with books, rocks and fossils.

Rorker's children are eager to show you their pets.

Your host is William Buckland, and he's a zoophage, someone with a passion for eating one of every animal on Earth.

Buckland was born in 1784 and became the first person ever to take geology, the study of the origin, history and structure of the Earth at the University of Oxford.

He was then ordained as a priest before becoming a reader in mineralogy, giving popular, if unorthodox, lectures.

A student recalled him sweeping down the front row one morning, holding a hyena skull.

He picked out an undergraduate and demanded, What rules the world?

Dinner at the Buckland house could consist of hedgehog, crocodile, panther, sea slug, porpoise, mole and even earwig.

And life was no less extraordinary between meals.

William and his wife Mary taught their children natural history in a house packed to the rafters with specimens, animal, vegetable and mineral, living and dead.

When they weren't riding ponies through the dining room or playing with snakes and frogs, the children took part in their parents' scientific studies.

One particularly wacky experiment involved spreading pie pastry over the kitchen table and allowing a pet tortoise to walk across it.

The family then compared the tracks to fossilised tortoise prints found in ancient sandstone.

Besides eating, fossils were the Bucklands' passion.

As a religious man, William believed that the Great Flood mentioned in Genesis was not just a story, but historical fact, and he spent a long time trying to reconcile the Bible's accounts with geological evidence.

However, after examining the remains of exotic creatures, including hyenas, found in a cave in North Yorkshire, he started to question the Bible's timeline.

These animals had not, as some argued passionately, been washed there from their tropical homes by Noah's Flood.

And the passage of geological time had since turned the British Isles from a tropical to a temperate landscape.

William proved this by identifying large amounts of hyena dung on the cave floor.

And time helped explain another mystery of the era, dinosaurs.

In 1824, Buckland announced arguably his greatest breakthrough of all, the fossilised bones of a giant reptile he named Megalosaurus, found in a slate quarry in Oxfordshire.

It was the first scientific account of a dinosaur.

He showed them to French anatomist Georges Cuvier, who noticed the bones' similarity with living lizards.

Buckland, Cuvier and others' work was vital in helping Victorian Britain understand dinosaurs and their place in evolution.

William's wife Mary was a keen geologist and a collector in her own right.

She illustrated those game-changing hyena bones for the Royal Society and produced beautiful teaching aids for William's lectures.

Like many wives of scientists in the 19th century, she may have done much more than that, perhaps contributing to some of William's major works.

As for William's quest to eat the world's animals, well, he failed to complete the challenge, despite his best efforts.

After a period of illness unrelated to his diet, he died in 1856.

Eccentric as they were, the Bucklands remind us that science can happen anywhere, including at home, and that great science can also be great fun, as long as you're not a mouse.