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In 1824, Buckland found and described a lower jaw from Jurassic deposits from Stonesfield. He determined that the bone belonged to a carnivorous land-dwelling reptile he called "Megalosaurus". That same year Gideon Mantell realized that some large teeth he had found in 1822, in Cretaceous rocks from Tilgate, belonged to a giant herbivorous land-dwelling reptile. He called it "Iguanodon", because the teeth resembled those of an iguana. All of this led Mantell to publish an influential paper in 1831 entitled "The Age of Reptiles" in which he summarized the evidence for there having been an extended time during which the earth had teemed with large reptiles, and he divided that era, based in what rock strata different types of reptiles first appeared, into three intervals that anticipated the modern periods of the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous. In 1832 Mantell would find, in Tilgate, a partial skeleton of an armored reptile he would call "Hylaeosaurus". In 1841 the English anatomist Richard Owen would create a new order of reptiles, which he called Dinosauria, for "Megalosaurus", "Iguanodon", and "Hylaeosaurus".
This evidence that giant reptiles had lived on Earth in the past caused great excitement in scientific circles, and even among some segments of the general public. Buckland did describe the jaw of a small primitive mammal, "Phascolotherium", that was found in the same strata as "Megalosaurus". This discovery, known as the Stonesfield mammal, was a much discussed anomaly. Cuvier at first thought it was a marsupial, but Buckland later realized it was a primitive placental mammal. Due to its small size and primitive nature, Buckland did not believe it invalidated the overall pattern of an age of reptiles, when the largest and most conspicuous animals had been reptiles rather than mammals.
Buckland