Gideon Mantell was born in 1790 in Lewes, Sussex, the son of a shoemaker. Apprenticed to a local surgeon at fifteen, he trained further at St Bartholomew's Hospital in London and qualified as a surgeon in 1811, returning to Lewes to build a medical practice -- obstetrics and general surgery paid the bills, while fossils collected on house calls around the Sussex Weald became his consuming private interest.[2][3]
In 1822, unusually large fossil teeth turned up near a quarry the Mantells were visiting in Sussex. Mantell became convinced they belonged to a giant, unknown plant-eating reptile, but the era's leading anatomist, Georges Cuvier in Paris, first dismissed them as rhinoceros teeth. Only after a colleague at the Hunterian Museum noticed their resemblance to an iguana's did Mantell's interpretation hold up: he named the animal Iguanodon in 1825, one of the first three dinosaur genera ever recognized, alongside Buckland's Megalosaurus.[1][2]
A carriage accident in 1841 left Mantell with a severely damaged spine and chronic pain that never fully resolved. He continued publishing and lecturing through the 1840s despite worsening health, relying increasingly on opium to manage the pain, and died in London in 1852 of an accidental overdose.[3]