Buckland, William (1784-1856)

English geologist and palaeontologist, a principal pioneer of British geology. He contributed to the descriptive and historical stratigraphy of the British Isles, inferring from the vertical succession of the strata a stage-by-stage temporal development of the Earth's crust. Buckland was born in Axminster, Devon, and studied at Oxford, where he became reader in mineralogy 1813 and in geology 1818. He was also a cleric and in 1845 became dean of Westminster. Using the comparative anatomy of French palaeontologist Georges Cuvier, Buckland reconstructed Megalosaurus and, in his book Relics of the Deluge 1823, explored the geological history of Kirkdale Cavern, a hyena cave den in Yorkshire. His interest in catastrophic transformations of the Earth's surface in the geologically recent past, as indicated by such features as fossil bones and erratic boulders, led him to become an early British exponent of the glacial theory of J L R Agassiz, once he abandoned his assertion (set out in Geology Vindicated 1819) that these were caused by the biblical Flood.