William Buckland's Theology of Geology

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William Buckland’s Theology of Geology

The geologist William Buckland worked through many theories about the creation of Earth and the biblical Flood. None of them were quite right.

Patricia Fara
| Published in
History Today
Volume 76 Issue 9 September 2026

The Oxford University geologist William Buckland (1784-1856) was thrilled when in 1823, exploring a Welsh cave, he unexpectedly came across some ancient human bones. Renowned in scientific circles for his powers of deduction, he pronounced that the remains dated from Roman times and belonged to a local prostitute, whom he christened the Red Lady of Paviland. Fortunately for Buckland’s self-esteem, he never found out that he was wrong on two counts. Closer examination revealed that the ‘Red Lady’ was actually a man – and modern carbon-dating techniques show that he died about 35,000 years ago, making him the oldest human skeleton ever excavated in Britain.
Displaying the prejudices of a 19th-century gentleman, Buckland blithely assumed that the skeleton must be female because it had been stained red and was adorned with jewellery. And swayed by his theological beliefs, he ignored indications of the skeleton’s great antiquity. Even so, unlike many other 19th-century geologists Buckland saw no head-on confrontation between science and religion. On the contrary, he spearheaded a campaign to boost the status of science by showing that it could strengthen rather than weaken the authority of Christianity.
Geological partnership
An ordained priest who later became the dean of Westminster, William Buckland was also a Fellow of Corpus Christi College in Oxford. In 1818 he persuaded the prince regent to fund a post that was tailor-made for him: a readership in geology. Only six years later he coined the name ‘megalosaurus’ – giant lizard – for some massive bones he had discovered in the nearby countryside. Geologists were totally baffled by this ancient creature. Without realising it at the time, Buckland had discovered the world’s first dinosaur skeleton, although the new category of ‘dinosaurs’ was not invented until 1842.
Buckland soon established a lifelong reputation for eccentricity by travelling round the countryside on a black mare weighed down with geological specimens. Even though the university had not yet introduced science courses, he immediately attracted audiences for his flamboyant demonstrations. One student remembered climbing up a narrow staircase before entering a room piled high with bones, shells, and rocks where Buckland held forth in ‘his black gown looking like a necromancer, sitting on the one rickety chair not covered with fossils’.
Buckland was a scientific gourmet who aspired to taste everything in existence. He treated his guests to some exotic specialities, including mice on toast, beaver, and roast panther – although he did draw the line at moles and bluebottle flies, which he found disgusting. His other quirks included keeping a hyena imported from Africa in his back garden and serving unsuspecting visitors with refreshments from his coffee table, which had some curious objects inlaid in its surface: only later did he identify them as coprolites, the word he coined for fossilised faeces, on which he was an expert.
Like many other men of science, William Buckland benefited from a valuable collaborator concealed at home: his wife Mary, who had been studying science since she was a teenager and was already well versed in geology when they first met. Their honeymoon was a year-long geological tour around Europe, and after their return she bore nine children as well as providing the illustrations for his books, editing his prose, labelling his collection of scientific specimens, and mending broken fossils. Her kitchen even provided the site for a practical experiment: on realising that he was perplexed by some fossil dinosaur footprints, she rolled out a sheet of pastry and persuaded a tortoise to walk across it to show the resemblance. According to her eldest son Frank, she was ‘naturally endowed with great mental powers, habits of order and perseverance’. Yet even though Buckland relied so heavily on his wife’s contributions, he lobbied to exclude women from meetings at the recently founded British Association for the Advancement of Science.
Yorkshire hyenas
By the early 19th century it had become clear that Earth was far, far older than the 6,000 years that the Irish scholar Archbishop Ussher had calculated in 1654 after carefully analysing a wide array of historical evidence. To explain this disparity, Buckland helped to promote the ingenious reinterpretation that there had been two distinct acts of creation separated by an extended gap in time. According to his version of gap creationism, the Bible can be reinterpreted to show that there were two separate stages of creation. The first verse of the Book of Genesis states simply that ‘In the beginning God created the Heaven and the Earth’. But Buckland maintained that an extremely long unspecified period of time then elapsed before the events of the six following days described in the rest of the chapter. During this prolonged interlude, the multiple creations and extinctions that had been demonstrated by palaeontologists took place before human history began.

William Buckland is delivering a special lecture at the old Ashmolean Museum on 15 February 1823, Nathaniel Whittock. Wellcome Collection. Public Domain.

Many English geologists – most famously Charles Lyell – believed that the universe had developed gradually and uniformly, but Buckland was a great admirer of the French expert Georges Cuvier, who suggested instead that there had been a series of dramatic, catastrophic upheavals. According to Cuvier, Europe’s geological features could be explained by supposing that in the long distant past, a massive tide of water had swept across the continent, killing all the animals and distributing large rocks. Although Cuvier had no interest in reconciling science with the scriptures, Buckland claimed that Cuvier’s ancient flood might be the Deluge described in the Bible, when Noah preserved all the animals by sailing to safety with two of every kind in his ark.
Buckland set out to find the evidence he needed to confirm this idea. Following various inconclusive field trips abroad, he struck lucky nearer home after some quarry workers stumbled across a small cave near Kirkdale in Yorkshire. When he crawled through its small opening, Buckland found that the floor was littered with gnawed bony remnants of many different mammals – wolves and tigers, rhinoceroses and hippopotamuses – all encased within a protective layer of limestone that had accumulated over the millennia. It was as if he had entered the capsule of a time-machine that made it possible to witness a vanished world.
These relics offered valuable evidence to confirm Buckland’s conjectures that the British climate used to be sufficiently warm for such animals to thrive. But he was immediately confronted by another puzzle: even if there had been a massive flood, how could it have swept so many large skeletons inside a cave with such a narrow entrance? But then he lighted upon an explanation. Spotting that there was a disproportionately high number of hyenas, Buckland suggested that the cavern had been their den to which they could retreat and guzzle their prey without risk of being disturbed. To test this hypothesis, he recruited his own pet hyena as an experimental subject. After feeding it some cow bones, he was rewarded by seeing that its tooth marks matched those on the fossils. As further confirmation of his hypothesis, he showed some small solid balls he found in the cave to a keeper at Exeter Zoo, who immediately identified them as hyena excrement.
Buckland also thought carefully about how his specimens had been preserved. The protective layers of stalagmite formed from slowly dripping water were so thin that this carnivorous meal must have been geologically recent, enabling him to conclude triumphantly that his cave – or as he put it, ‘this charnel house of the antediluvian forests of Yorkshire’ – revealed the realities of animal life before the onslaught of Cuvier’s/Noah’s inundation. On this occasion, Buckland’s interpretation of the paleontological data was judged to be so exemplary that he won the Copley Medal, the most prestigious award of the Royal Society.
After the Flood
Although the Kirkdale cave had not confirmed his flood hypothesis, Buckland continued to search out other sources of evidence. After visiting numerous other ancient caves, Buckland suggested that a Europe-wide deluge had been responsible for depositing the thin layer of mud that covered the site at Kirkdale. Could that perhaps be equated with the biblical flood, when Noah took refuge on his ark? Buckland was so convinced of having solved the riddle that in 1823 he published his ideas in a bestselling book, Reliquiæ Diluvianæ.
But as new theories were developed, Buckland became less certain. In 1838 he travelled to Switzerland to meet a younger Swiss geologist, Louis Agassiz, whose research changed his mind. According to Agassiz, Europe’s surface features had indeed been fashioned by water – but in the form of ice. All Buckland’s evidence supporting a flood could be reinterpreted to support the novel suggestion that a giant glacial sheet had once covered the continent, carving out valleys as it carried rocks and gravel from one place to another. Confronted with such persuasive scientific arguments, Buckland relinquished his scriptural interpretations – but he died without changing his views on the Red Lady of Paviland.

Patricia Fara is an Emeritus Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge.

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William Buckland, an Oxford geologist, pursued various theories regarding the creation of Earth and the biblical Flood, though none ultimately proved fully accurate. Upon discovering ancient human bones in a Welsh cave, he initially presumed the remains belonged to a local prostitute, christening her the Red Lady of Paviland, reflecting the prejudices of the nineteenth-century gentleman. Despite recognizing the great antiquity of the skeleton, Buckland reconciled his findings with his theological beliefs by seeking to demonstrate that science could bolster Christianity rather than undermine it. As a Fellow of Corpus Christi College and an ordained priest, Buckland actively sought to enhance the status of science through his work.

Buckland contributed significantly to geological understanding, notably coining the term megalosaurus for massive bones he discovered, which ultimately led to the identification of the world's first dinosaur skeleton, although the concept of dinosaurs was not formally established until 1842. He cultivated a reputation as an eccentric scientific gourmet, traveling extensively with geological specimens and engaging in flamboyant demonstrations. His personal life and professional output were greatly influenced by his wife Mary, who was a keen student of science and provided essential support, including illustrations, editing, and facilitating practical experiments related to their geological studies.

Buckland promoted a form of gap creationism, positing that there were two distinct stages of creation separated by an immense span of time during which various extinctions occurred before human history began. He was influenced by the ideas of Georges Cuvier, who suggested catastrophic upheavals as explanations for geological features. Buckland attempted to integrate this catastrophic view with biblical accounts, suggesting that Cuvier’s ancient flood might correspond to Noah’s Deluge, where Noah preserved various animal species.

His investigation into the cave fossils was driven by the need to confirm his flood hypothesis. He discovered bony remnants of various mammals encased in limestone within a cave, leading him to hypothesize that the area must have been warm enough for these animals to thrive before the flood. He proposed that the cave was a den for hyenas, testing this by using his pet hyena as an experimental subject and finding matches between the fossilized tooth marks and the hyena’s marks. Buckland concluded that the preservation of the remains indicated a geologically recent carnivorous meal, which he interpreted as evidence existing prior to the great inundation. His interpretation of this paleontological evidence was recognized with the Copley Medal.

Although the specific evidence from the Kirkdale cave did not confirm the flood hypothesis, Buckland continued to seek supporting evidence. He suggested that a Europe-wide deluge might have deposited the mud over the site, and he published these ideas in the book Reliquiæ Diluvianæ. However, his views evolved following his engagement with Louis Agassiz in Switzerland. Agassiz’s research suggested that continental features were formed by a massive glacial sheet rather than a flood. While Buckland abandoned his scriptural interpretations in favor of these emerging scientific arguments, he died maintaining his conviction regarding the Red Lady of Paviland.