Born on March 12, 1784, William Buckland was a pioneer geologist and minister and is known for the first ever full fossilized structure discovered which he named Megalosaurus. Buckland was a lecturer and a priest at Oxford university and had a reputation for his way of teaching. Buckland would yell questions out loud to the class to test their knowledge while thrusting a hyena skull near their faces to see if they could keep focus on his questions. In Buckland’s free time he would import animals to Britain such as snakes, eagles, monkeys, and a hyena which he named Billy. Buckland would often eat animal meat like mice on toast, porpoise, panther, and more. Buckland’s goal was to eat every animal on Earth, and in his opinion the worst tasting animals were the common mole and the bluebottle fly.

Animal meat wasn’t the only thing Buckland tasted, Buckland had tasted the limestone wall of an Italian cathedral to see if the legend of the saint’s blood was embedded in the limestone walls and floors. Buckland’s favorite story to tell was his trip to Lord Harcourt in 1848 where the Harcourt family had a silver locket that held the mummified heart of King Louis XIV. After the French revolution, the new order could have cared less what would happen with King Louis’ heart and when an English Lord’s family got a hold of the silver locket they had a fancy dinner and had invited William Buckland and some Harcourt guests. While the silver locket was being passed along the guests at the table Buckland couldn’t help his excitement so when the locket was in his hands he had announced “I have eaten many strange things, but I have never eaten the heart of a king before.” With that Buckland opened the locket and swallowed the walnut sized heart of King Louis XIV. When Buckland died in 1856 he had earned his burial to be in Westminster Abbey with other famous British and Englishmen.