William Buckland Facts
William Buckland Facts
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| Interesting William Buckland Facts: |
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| William Buckland was born at Axminster, England, where his father was the Rector of Templeton and Trusham. |
| He and his father took walks and collected fossil shells near the local quarries. |
| Buckland attended Winchester College where he won a scholarship to Corpus Christi College, Oxford. |
| He entered Oxford in 1801 to study for the priesthood but also took classes in chemistry and mineralogy. |
| In 1804 he earned his BA and his MA in 1808. |
| He was ordained an Anglican priest in 1809 but continued to study geology in England, Scotland and Wales. |
| In 1813 he succeeded John Kidd as lecturer in mineralogy. |
| He built collections for the Ashmolean Museum. |
| He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 1818. |
| In 1820 he published Connexion of Geology with Religion explained, which sought to reconcile the Biblical account of creation and the Flood with observable facts in geology. |
| He believed that the word "beginning" in the Bible meant an undefined amount of time. |
| During his study of Kirkdale Cave and its collection fossilized excrement, which he named coprolites, he determined that hyenas had inhabited the cave since ancient times. |
| His paper on Kirkdale Cave earned him the Copley Medal in 1922. |
| At the presentation the society's president, Humphrey Davy, stated that "a distinct epoch...has been established in the history of the revolutions of our globe." |
| On January 18, 1823, Buckland discovered a skeleton in Paviland Cave. |
| Although the skeleton was found in the same strata as mammoth bones, he didn't know how long humans had existed and presumed it was an historic burial. |
| Carbon dating has since revealed the skeleton to be that of a male approximately 33,000 years old. |
| In 1836 Buckland wrote one of the Bridgewater Treatises in which he admitted that geology could not confirm the Biblical account of the "Universal Deluge." |
| He believed that the evidence of past submergence was due to glaciation and not a universal flood. |
| His treatise was entitled Geology and Mineralogy considered with reference to Natural Theology. |
| Buckland used Mary Anning's collection of coprolites from the digestive tracts of dinosaurs to construct a description of the Liassic food chain. |
| In 1840 he and Swiss geologist Louis Agassiz toured Scotland and found evidence of previous glaciation. |
| In 1840 Buckland became president of the Geological Society and he prepared the case for the establishment of the Geological Survey of Great Britain. |
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