Buckland in field collecting gear. The Reverend William Buckland D.D. F.R.S. Canon of Christ Church and Professor of Geology and Minerology in the University of Oxford. Painted by Richard Ansdell in 1843 and lithographed by Walker and Boutall. Buckland was an influential paleontologist at the start of the 19th Century who described science's first dinosaur. His works brought the prehistoric world into prominence in Britain. He believed he had found evidence of the flood and mistook his discovery of a palaeolithic burial for a Roman or celtic one. He was quite eccentric, and some like Darwin, found him a little too keen on celebrity. He was a good teacher, his own academic work improved by consulting William Conybeare. A tuberculous growth at the base of the skull reputedly caused madness in later life. His son Frank went on to be well known.