What did the world’s greatest anatomist mistake a dinosaur bone for? And how did the man who hunted India’s most feared serial killers end up discovering Asia’s first dinosaur fossils?

The first episode of Rearview opens in a cold Oxford study in 1677, where a scholar turns over a colossal bone and confidently declares it the thigh of a Roman war-elephant. That sets the tone for two centuries of outrageous confident error: bones mistaken for whales, fish, rhinoceroses, and — in one glorious near-miss — awarded the scientific name Scrotum humanum. The reason everyone got it so spectacularly wrong turns out to have nothing to do with stupidity, and everything to do with a the, yet unknown concept of ‘deep time.’

The episode then traces the two rival Englishmen who finally cracked it — a chaotic, bear-keeping Oxford clergyman and a Sussex country doctor whose wife may, or may not, have found the decisive tooth by a roadside — before crossing four thousand miles to the Narmada valley, where a thug-hunting East India Company captain accidentally dug up the earliest dinosaur bones ever found in Asia, and left behind, almost incidentally, a thread that leads to Mowgli.

Hosts: Jacob Koshy and Sobhana K Nair

Producer and editor: Jude Francis Weston

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