He sent the tooth to Cuvier in Paris for an opinion, but the great Frenchman dismissed it as being from a hippopotamus. (Cuvier later apologized handsomely for his uncharacteristic error.) One day while doing research at the Hunterian Museum in London, Mantell fell into conversation with a fellow researcher who told him the tooth looked very like those of animals he had been studying, South American iguanas. A hasty comparison confirmed the resemblance. And so Mantell's creature became Iguanodon, after a basking tropical lizard to which it was not in any manner related.
This quote stands out to me because of the sheer stupidity of the people involved. First, the guy who said it looked like a hippopotamus tooth. I haven't seen hippo teeth but there is no way a tooth like that could be mistaken for a hippo tooth. Chances are the guy took one glance at it, said "I'm not wasting my time with this" and told the guy the first thing off the top of his head to get him off of his back. Then comes the guy who said it looked like an iguana. Okay, this is slightly more believable, but you'd think that they would run more than just a hasty comparison before they determine something of that scale in the history of our own planet and the species that walked it. It seems to me like they just wanted to get something out there, and put as little effort into it as humanly possible while doing so...
You make a pretty good point... scientists shouldn't be BSing it like that--they should have looked at a hippo teeth to compare.
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