Buckland giving a lecture on fossils and displaying some of his prize specimens. The long-beaked skull at the front is an Ichthyosaur, a marine reptile that belonged to a separate group from the dinosaurs. William Buckland (March 12, 1784, August, 14 1856) the English geologist and palaeontologist who wrote the first full account of a fossil dinosaur, which he called megalosaurus, or great lizard. He was a pioneer in the use of fossilized faeces, for which he coined the term coprolites, to reconstruct ancient ecosystems. Buckland was a proponent of the Gap Theory that interpreted the biblical account of Genesis as referring to two separate episodes of creation separated by a lengthy period, Early in his career he believed that he had found geologic evidence of the biblical flood, but later became convinced that the glaciation theory of Louis Agassiz provided a better explanation.