Buckland wrote the first full account of a fossil dinosaur, which he named "Megalosaurus". He proved that Kirkdale Cave in Yorkshire had been a prehistoric hyena den, for which he was awarded the Copley Medal of the Royal Society. He was praised as an example of how scientific analysis could reconstruct events from the distant past. He was a pioneer in the use of fossilized faeces (he coined the term coprolites) to reconstruct ancient ecosystems.