The Quiet Period
The dinosaur mania of Victorian times waned during the early decades of the twentieth century, and in the following years there were very few studies on dinosaurs from the Isle of Wight. In fact, it was not until 1996 that a new species of dinosaur from the Isle of Wight was formally described. Perhaps it was the growing instability in Europe, a shortage of money and of course the commencement of the 1914-18 war that brought to a close the Golden Age of dinosaur discoveries in Europe. Perhaps also it was the opening up of the prolific dinosaur beds in the Cretaceous rocks of North America and Mongolia that drew attention away from the poorly exposed dinosaur-bearing strata of England. The only serious scientific work undertaken on Isle of Wight material in the early part of the twentieth century was that of R. W. Hooley, who described remains of Iguanodon from Brighstone Bay and Atherfield (Hooley 1912, 1925) and some quite remarkable pterosaur remains also from Atherfield (Hooley 1913). After Hooley, only two serious papers were published on Isle of Wight dinosaurs in the 1930s, both by Swinton (1936a, b). Swinton (1934a, b, 1936a, b) discussed the anatomy of Hypsilophodon and the dinosaur fauna as a whole. In fact, this was the first ever synthesis of the entire fauna. In England the recession of the 1930s began to bite and was followed by World War Two. It was not until the war had ended that the Island's dinosaurs were again in the news (Swinton 1946). Dinosaurs in England must definitely have been out of vogue, for apart from a small item by Stroh (1949) published locally, the dinosaurs of the Isle of Wight were virtually ignored by the scientific community until the very late 1960s and early 1970s.
This hiatus in scientific endeavour begs the question as to what happened to all of the dinosaur fossils that were washed from the cliffs during this period. Were they lost to the sea? If so, these remains are probably sitting among the gravel lying about a half kilometre from the present day shoreline. Perhaps these are the rolled, eroded and encrusted remains that continue to be washed up during violent westerly storms.
Reginald Walter Hooley (b. 1866, d. 1923)
Reginald Hooley was a businessman from Winchester with a passion for fossil collecting. He was born in Southampton and, as a youngster, developed a keen interest in geology (Crane and Getty 1975). After moving to Winchester, where he began working for a firm of wine and spirit merchants, he joined the then young Hampshire Field Club and Archaeological Society. By 1918 he had become the local honorary secretary of the club and was active in it until his untimely death in 1923. He made several spectacular discoveries on the Isle of Wight including a near complete skeleton of Iguanodon atherfieldensis and several partial skeletons of pterosaurs and crocodiles. Unlike Fox, Hooley turned his hand to scientific writing and produced several seminal works on the anatomy of Island fossils that he had discovered and is posthumously credited with naming Iguanodon atherfieldensis. Hooley published 14 scientific papers on geology, the majority on aspects of vertebrate palaeontology, but he also wrote about geomorphology and archaeology. By far his greatest scientific publishing achievement was in describing the new pterosaur 'Ornithodesmus' latidens which, subsequently, became the type of a new family of pterosaurs. The text of his seminal work describing the osteology of Iguanodon atherfieldensis was read before the Geological Society of London in November 1925, and was published shortly after (Hooley 1925). At that meeting Charles W. Andrews spoke of the very great loss to palaeontology of Hooley, such was the esteem that he was held by the scientific establishment. Shortly after his death Reid and Chandler (1926) named a fossil plant Hooleya in honour of his contributions to palaeontology. A small part of Hooley's fossil collection was donated to the Winchester Museum where he was an honorary curator from 1918-1923, but the most important specimens he obtained were sold to the Natural History Museum, London (Crane and Getty 1975).
