CHRIS KOENIG looks back at the life of the clergyman William Buckland, Oxford's first professor of geology

The 19th-century clergyman William Buckland, who became Oxford's first professor of geology, found himself wrestling with the difficult task of reconciling his geological discoveries with his belief that fossils and even dinosaur bones - such as those he discovered in Stonesfield - were physical evidence of Noah's Flood as described in the bible.

But did his reluctance to let go of this theory in any way account for his very inaccurate findings concerning the Red Lady of Pavland, whose skeleton this month went on show at the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff?

Until their move, the bones resided in that Victorian wrought-iron cathedral of natural history, Oxford University Museum, in Parks Road, for 150 years - a long time compared to the time they spent within the body of their original owner, but a mere twinkling of an eye compared to the 29,000 years they existed without flesh.

The University Museum, which kept the bones out of public view for the last 40 years, has loaned the skeleton to the National Museum of Wales for a year.

Mr Buckland decided that the Red Lady - so called because ochre discoloured the bones - had once been a prostitute at the Roman camp near Goat's Hole Cave, Pavland, on the Gower Peninsula, where he discovered the skeleton in 1823. In other words, they were not very old.

Now scientists at Oxford's Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit have established that the bones are in fact the oldest anatomically modern human skeleton (that is, not Neanderthal) in Europe. And that they are those of a man not a woman.

But mock not. William Buckland, though an eccentric of the first water, was also a great scientist; the first indeed to write a full account of a dinosaur fossil.

He had no means of objectively dating bones (or indeed anything else, come to that) and conjectured that the skeleton was that of a prostitute because of the quantity of mammoth-ivory bracelets found with it.

He won a scholarship to Corpus Christi in 1801 and went on to become a Canon of Christ Church, President of the Geological Society of London, and something of a national celebrity. He became unofficial curator of the old Ashmolean (now the Museum of the History of Science in Broad Street) where his lectures were attended not only by students but by the great and the good.

He was a great believer in demonstrating that we are what we eat, and to demonstrate the point set about eating his way through the animal kingdom. Dinner guests were likely to be served fried mole.

When he visited Lord Harcourt at Nuneham Courtenay he was shown the heart of Louis XIV in a casket. He remarked that he had never tasted a king's heart before - and swallowed it! But did his creationist belief in what came to be known as Flood Geology influence his judgement? Probably not in the case of the Red Lady. And later in life, and unusually for a Victorian scientist, he changed his mind about fossils too, deciding that they were deposited by glaciers, not by flood.

Now there is a movement afoot for a blue plaque to go up on his house in Islip, where he lived with his wife and nine children after becoming the Dean of Westminster.