In addition, by the 1830s the cooling earth theory was gaining coherence as an explanation as to why geological activity was greater in the past than now, further fuelling the view that the earth developed, and that life forms had been very different in the past. In 1824 Buckland himself described the first known dinosaur, the gigantic Megalosaurus, though the word ‘dinosaur’ wasn’t coined until 1841, by the great anatomist Richard Owen.
