William Buckland
English clergyman, geologist and palaeontologist (1784-1856)
William Buckland DD, FRS (12 March 1784 – 14 August 1856) was an English theologian, geologist and palaeontologist.
His work in the early 1820s proved that Kirkdale Cave in North Yorkshire had been a prehistoric hyena den, for which he was awarded the Copley Medal. It was praised as an example of how scientific analysis could reconstruct events in the distant past. He pioneered the use of fossilised faeces in reconstructing ecosystems, coining the term coprolites. Buckland also wrote the first full account of a fossil dinosaur, which he named Megalosaurus in 1824. He also discovered the so-called Red Lady of Paviland, one of the first discovered human skeletons now recognised as coming from the Upper Palaeolithic.
Buckland followed the Gap Theory in interpreting the biblical account of Genesis as two widely separated episodes of creation. It had emerged as a way to reconcile the scriptural account with discoveries in geology suggesting the earth was very old. Early in his career Buckland believed he had found evidence of the biblical flood, but later saw that the glaciation theory of Louis Agassiz gave a better explanation, and played a significant role in promoting it.
Buckland served as Dean of Westminster from 1845 until his death 1856.
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This entry incorporates text from “William Buckland” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.