Educated at home by his mother, he went, at eight and a half, to a boarding school in Cotterstock, Northamptonshire staying with his uncle John Buckland.

From 1837 to 1839, he went to a preparatory school in Laleham, Surrey, run by his uncle, John Buckland,[1] a brutal headmaster who flogged his pupils quite excessively.

"[4] He was not a first-rate scholar, but managed to gain entrance to Christ Church, Oxford in October 1844,[5] after failing to get a scholarship to the smaller Corpus Christi.

[8] When the British Association met in 1847 at Oxford, Frank took along his pet bear Tigleth Pileser dressed in student attire of a cap and gown to the party.

Passing out in May 1848 and at the advice of Richard Owen and Sir Benjamin Brodie, his father sent him to study surgery in London at St George's Hospital under Caesar Hawkins.

[16] A vivid word-portrait was written by a surgical colleague, Charles Lloyd: Four and a half feet in height and rather more in breadth – what he measured round the chest is not known to mortal man.

His chief passion was surgery – elderly maidens called their cats indoors as he passed by and young mothers who lived in the neighbourhood gave their nurses more than ordinarily strict injunctions as to their babies.

To a lover of natural history it was a pleasant sight to see him at dinner with a chicken before him... and see how, undeterred by foolish prejudices, he devoured the brain.

[18] Frank was elected to the Athenaeum Club in February 1854, and later that year was gazetted as Assistant Surgeon to the Second Life Guards.

In January and February 1859, Buckland made a search for the coffin of John Hunter in the vaults of St Martin-in-the-Fields.

Buckland called Hunter the "greatest of Englishmen" and on 22 February he discovered the coffin after withstanding the noxious air in the vault.

This habit he learnt from his father, whose residence, the Deanery, offered such rare delights as mice in batter, squirrel pie, horse's tongue and ostrich.

After the "Eland Dinner" in 1859 at the London Tavern, organised by Richard Owen, Buckland set up the Acclimatization Society to further the search for new food.

Buckland spoke about the introduction of the turkey, musk-duck and pheasant in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth century respectively and that it was a pity that the same monotonous food was being eaten in the heyday of Queen Victoria's reign.

Buckland's home, 37 Albany Street, London, was famous for its menagerie and its varied menus,[25] including, at times, boiled elephant trunk, rhinoceros pie, porpoise heads, and stewed mole.

[24][29] It funds a Buckland Professor each year to give public talks in relevant parts of the United Kingdom and Ireland on a matter of current concern in the commercial fisheries.