Stonesfield, United Kingdom

Lying near Oxford University, Stonesfield's slate quarries produced the first fossils to be formally identified as those of a non-avian dinosaur. A partial femur found in 1676 was published by Robert Plot as belonging to a Roman war elephant and then to a Biblical giant; the specimen was lost but later identified from Plot's illustration and description as belonging to a megalosaur. Other Stonesfield fossils were acquired by the physician Christopher Pegge, the chemist John Kidd, and the geologist William Buckland. With guidance by the French anatomist Georges Cuvier, Buckland eventually realized they came from a bipedal lizard-like carnivore unlike any now living, publishing his description in 1824 with the name Megalosaurus, the "great Fossil Lizard of Stonesfield". The fossils used by Buckland are now displayed at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History. Other species later found at Stonesfield include the crocodile Steneosaurus, the pterosaur Rhamphocephalus, and the type specimens of the theropod genus Iliosuchus and the quadruped Stereognathus. This last species belongs to the cynodont clade, a form of protomammal.

On 25 January 1712, a tenant farmer named George Handes or Hannes rediscovered the old Roman villa while plowing the Chesthill Acre fields. He tricked his landlord, Richard Fowler of Great Barrington, Gloucestershire, into allowing him to dig around his fields before revealing what he had found, leading to a prolonged dispute over ownership and the rights to income from the many visitors who came from Oxford and abroad. Ultimately, three large mosaics were uncovered, the largest of which featured the Roman god Bacchus holding a thyrsus and riding a panther. Oxford academics and their guests destroyed these, removing fragments piecemeal as souvenirs, although Thomas Hearne, Bernard Gardiner, and others created illustrations and descriptions while it was still largely whole and the Ashmolean Museum was able to acquire some hypocaust flue-tiles and the base of a pillar. The antiquaries William Stukeley and Richard Gough blamed the destruction on the tenant's maliciousness and "the mob, who refused to pay for seeing it"; the owners were also accused of salting the site with additional coins from other sources once they saw the profit from their original discoveries. The site was neglected after the initial interest waned; however, as late as 1780 the antiquarian Daines Barrington reported that the mosaic found in 1712 survived "in tolerable preservation". Around that time, a second excavation took place, revealing a smaller room and parts of the villa's baths. The careless enclosure of Stonefield's common lands in 1801 caused the site of the Roman villa to be divided among 3 different owners, who seem to have quickly removed the last of the known ruins. By 1806, Gough's new edition of William Camden's Britannia reported it "destroyed, except some of the borders... and part of the corners"; James Brewer's 1813 Beauties of England and Wales noted that even the relics on the Duke of Marlborough's new land had not been preserved; and John Yonge Akerman found it "totally destroyed" by 1858. Despite George Allen's interest in aerial archaeology around Oxfordshire, he never bothered to photograph the site.