William Buckland was born in 1784 in Axminster, Devon, the son of a clergyman who took him fossil-hunting along the Dorset coast as a child. He studied at Winchester College and then Corpus Christi College, Oxford, graduating in 1805 and later being ordained as an Anglican priest -- he spent his career holding science and theology together, at a time when many saw the two as in tension.[3]
In 1815 Buckland began acquiring large fossil bones from the Stonesfield quarry near Oxford: a lower jaw, vertebrae, and fragments of the pelvis and hind limb of an enormous, unidentified reptile. He presented his description to the Geological Society on February 20, 1824, naming the animal Megalosaurus -- "great lizard" -- making it the first dinosaur genus ever formally described and named, some 18 years before Richard Owen coined the word "dinosaur" itself in 1842.[1][2]
Buckland went on to become Oxford's first Reader in Geology and, later, Dean of Westminster. He remained an eccentric and enthusiastic public figure throughout his life -- famously curious enough about the natural world to have tasted his way through much of the animal kingdom. He died in 1856 and is buried at Islip, Oxfordshire.[3]