Jurassic Mary by Patricia Pierce

Author:Patricia Pierce
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780752495699
Publisher: The History Press
Published: 2013-03-21T04:00:00+00:00

Mary Anning had unearthed the first British Dimorphodon macronyx. Some of the fossil can be found in the Natural History Museum, London,51 but the teeth were in the Philpot collection and so they eventually went to Oxford.

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In the emerging new sciences of geology and palaeontology, public curiosity was growing faster than national museums were being established. Until the Natural History Museum was completed in 1881, a rapidly expanding collection of specimens was held in the British Museum’s Natural History Section. Also, entrepreneurs set up private natural history museums and exhibitions, especially in the large cities, which helped to satisfy the interest of the public.

One early museum was the ‘Holophusikon’ in Leicester House, Leicester Square, London, founded by Sir Ashton Lever, an obsessive who went bankrupt buying rare specimens. The result was that in 1785 lottery tickets were sold with the collection itself as the prize, and a land agent, James Parkinson, won. He kept it going for another twenty years, after which the collection was broken up and sold in a sixty-five-day sale, much of it to William Bullock (b. early 1780s, d. after 1843), who was from a family of showmen. Bullock’s Museum of Natural Curiosities was located in the Egyptian Hall at 22 Piccadilly, London, until the once popular collections were auctioned off in 1819.

Visitors to Lyme increased as Mary Anning won the respect of contemporary scientists. In 1829, she found her second complete plesiosaur, this time a Plesiosaurus dolichodeirus. The Dorset County Chronicle reported the find on 19 February:

Miss Mary Anning of Lyme, has discovered another specimen of the Plesiosaurus Dolichoderius [sic] (a long-necked animal, almost a lizard). This specimen, which is 11 feet in length, is almost perfect, and most of the bones are lying in perfect order. The head, sternum, vertebrae, and bones of the pelvis and the paddles, are all fine and in place. There are four vertebrae between the last dorsal vertebrae and caroidal vertebrae, with their false ribs attached; by which it appears that this creature had the power of shifting its sternum, property of some amphibious animals now existing, extremely curious, but very useful when swimming. There also appeared between the ribs (which are exceedingly fine) a bony substance that must have been either a skin or a shell.

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