Bishop Bell's Dinosaurs

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Contents 1 Definition 2 Bishop Bell 3 The "dinosaurs" 4 Hypotheses 4.1 Dinosaurs were roaming England in the fifteenth century. 4.2 A dinosaur was excavated in Cumbria in the fifteenth century. 4.3 It isn't a dinosaur 4.4 It's a modern hoax 5 Conclusion 6 Related Articles

[edit] Definition

Bishop Bell's dinosaurs are two animal figures on the brasswork of the tomb of Bishop Bell of Carlisle (d. 1496), which are said to resemble dinosaurs.

[edit] Bishop Bell

From 1457-65 Richard Bell was Prior of the priory at Finchale, County Durham. He was Prior of Durham from 1464-78, and was elevated to the bishopric of Carlisle in 1478[1]. According to the poem on his tomb[2], he was a spiritual, unworldly man who at first refused the promotion to the bishopric, and who "sought, above all, rewards for his brothers in his prayers". He resigned his post in 1495 to return to a monastic life, and died in 1496. He is buried in Carlisle cathedral.

[edit] The "dinosaurs"

The interesting aspect of the tomb, from the point of view of cryptozoologists and creationists, is that one of the ornaments on the brasswork looks rather like a dinosaur. Enthusiasts for this interpretation often claim both the animals shown here as saurian (which is why the title of this article refers to "dinosaurs", in the plural) but the one to the left looks much more like some kind of big cat. The animal to the right, though, does look rather more like a quadrupedal dinosaur than any other sort of animal, past or present.

[edit] Hypotheses

A number of hypotheses have been put forward to account for the image on the tomb.

[edit] Dinosaurs were roaming England in the fifteenth century.

This is, naturally, the interpretation preferred by cryptozoologists and by those Creationists who wish to believe in living or recent dinosaurs.

The problem with this is that if dinosaurs had been roaming Tudor England, we should certainly know about it by more than a single crude sketch on a few square inches of brasswork. To give the reader some sense of historical proportion, Richard Bell himself appears dozens of times in documents surviving from his era[3]. The English at that time had their chroniclers, their historians, and their makers of bestiaries, none of whom apparently noticed the presence of giant sauropods in Cumbria or elsewhere. The historical likelihood that they were there but went unrecorded, except on Bishop Bell's tomb, is about on a par with the proposition that Godzilla destroyed Manhattan in the days of Peter Stuyvesant, without any record of the event being preserved.

[edit] A dinosaur was excavated in Cumbria in the fifteenth century.

This hypothesis, though whimsical, is at least possible. Carlisle is built on red sandstone of the Upper Triassic[4]. The older buildings in Carlisle are built of this sandstone. The Fratry, a monastic institution just opposite Carlisle cathedral was almost entirely rebuilt in this stone during the time when Richard Bell was Bishop[5]; and Bell himself oversaw the building of what is now known as "Bell's Tower", at Rose Castle[6], the episcopal palace of Carlisle.

Basal quadrupedal dinosaurs such as the Melanorosauridae are known from English rocks of the Upper Triassic [7]. So it is not quite out of the question that Cumbrian quarrymen excavated a well-preserved fossil of such a dinosaur and drew it to the attention of the learned clerics of Carlisle.

[edit] It isn't a dinosaur

This hypothesis provokes the question: what is it then?

It might be many things, given enough ignorance on the part of the engraver - it might be meant for an elephant, if we suppose him to be sufficiently ill-informed.

Or it might be meant for a mythical beast. If you look carefully at the brass, you can see that the back of the creature has been worn away, and that there is an unexplained projection from its shoulders. It is tempting to complete this picture by hypothesizing that the missing detail is the wings of a dragon. In this case, the scene would represent a lion fighting a dragon, an allegorical image for the struggle of Christ against Satan which was popular in medieval art and which can be found, amongst other places, on the misericordes of Carlisle cathedral, which, like the "dinosaur", also date from the fifteenth century[8].

[edit] It's a modern hoax

This is possible, but unlikely. There have been other cases, such as the Ica stones, where fake pre-nineteenth century dinosaur images have been produced by fraudsters. However, in the case of Bishop Bell's dinosaur, there is no corresponding profit motive, or any other apparent motive; and also, any tampering with the tomb would have to be done in situ, in Carlisle Cathedral, and it is hard to see how a hoaxer could have gone about his work unobserved.

[edit] Conclusion

Sometimes skeptics don't get to reach conclusions. At the most, one can only rank these hypotheses in order of plausibility, a task we defer to the reader.

[edit] Related Articles

• Relics and Artifacts
• Dinosaurs
• Creationist Arguments
• Living Dinosaurs
• Dragons