Cabinet of Curiosities by Charlotte Wightwick - the ammonite on the mantelpiece

Searching for inspiration for this month’s Cabinet of Curiosities, a Google search (note: other search engines are available) reminded me that the original Cabinets often contained wonders of Natural History. This in turn made me think straight away of my own tiny pieces of natural history, a crystalline ammonite and a few chunks of belemnite found on the beach at Lyme Regis.

These are both common fossils – I spotted the belemnites myself, and the ammonite came from the same hour’s fossil-hunting tour (albeit from the guide, whose eye was much keener than mine) – but they bring me enormous pleasure despite that.

Fossils from Lyme in turn make me think of Mary Anning. As a scientist, she’s one who was long neglected, although in recent years her importance has started to be recognised.

Mary was born in 1799, the daughter of a carpenter. Her father supplemented the family’s earnings by selling fossils from the beach to the gentry who were starting to visit Lyme. When he died, Mary and her brother continued to sell their finds as a way of supporting themselves and their mother.

Mary became highly skilled, not only at finding new fossils, but also at understanding them. Her notes and drawings are detailed and exact. She made some of the most important and spectacular finds of the period, just as palaeontology was opening up whole new worlds of ancient creatures. She was a pioneer especially in the discovery of ancient marine reptiles such as plesiosaurs and ichthyosaurs. Men like William Buckland, the Reverend Conybeare, Gideon Mantell and Richard Owen all benefitted from Mary’s discoveries and expertise.

Mary Anning. Source: Wikimedia Commons

But as a woman – and a working class woman at that – she stood no chance to joining any of the learned scientific Societies in London, or even seeing her name in print as an expert writing about her finds. Nor did they usually even pay her especially well: money was a concern for most of Mary’s life. Mary died of breast cancer in 1847, at the age of 47.

In recent years, Mary’s story has become increasingly well-known. You can find it told (and her finds clearly labelled as hers) in museums such as the Natural History Museum, and several biographies exist. Her importance has been recognised by the scientific establishment. Her story has also been told through historical fiction including Tracy Chevalier’s Remarkable Creatures and by our very own Joan Lennon in the Daughters of Time anthology. Currently there’s a film in production which will help to bring her name to an even wider audience, as well as campaigns to get her onto the new £50 note and for a statue of her to be erected in Lyme.

Ms Anning was clearly a highly intelligent woman, who was knowledgeable, skilled and a true expert in her field. She lived at a time when incredible new discoveries were being made, and which she contributed to enormously. In many ways she was remarkable. But in others she was entirely unremarkable – or at least similar to countless women and working class people throughout history, who have got on with the hard grind of daily living, doing whatever needs to be done to make ends meet, knowing that they were likely to receive little credit and less glory for their hard work.

My ammonite sits in pride of place on my living room mantelpiece, a tiny monument to the wonders of Nature, and to the countless people like Mary who have contributed to our understanding of nature, science and history.

My own tiny ammonite, which nonetheless has

pride of place on my mantelpiece. 

You can find out more about Mary Anning at https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/mary-anning-unsung-hero.html and about the campaign to erect a statue in her honour at https://www.maryanningrocks.co.uk/

The 'Poo Table': August's Cabinet of Curiosities by Charlotte Wightwick

I hope you all had a great Bank Holiday Weekend. Mine was brilliant: I stayed with friends in Weymouth. The sun (unusually, for Bank Holiday) shone and we had a great time at the beach and barbequing. While I was there, I started to think about what I should include in this month’s Cabinet of Curiosities, and I remembered another trip to the Jurassic Coast, last year.

The Jurassic Coast is a 95-mile long World Heritage Site, made up of sedimentary rocks which together form a near-complete record of 185 million years of history. Last summer we took a day trip to Lyme Regis. Obviously, I was excited to see the Cobb (famous to all Jane Austen fans as the site of Louisa Musgrove’s accident in Persuasion).

But the Jurassic Coast – and perhaps in particular Lyme Regis - not only has some of the best fossils in the world, but was also home some of the most dramatic scientific discoveries of the early and mid-nineteenth century. Regular readers of this blog will know I have a strong interest in the early fossil hunters and scientists, and their discoveries (see January’s Cabinet of Curiosities http://the-history-girls.blogspot.co.uk/2017/01/cabinet-of-curiosities-first-dinosaur.html )

So I was looking forward to the fossils: seeing them and learning more about them, maybe even finding some for myself on the beach. (Which I did, by the way!)

What I didn’t expect to find, but what forms today’s entry for the Cabinet of Curiosities, was a table made of fossilised poo.

William Buckland's coprolite table, Lyme Regis museum

The technical term for fossilised faeces is a coprolite, and they are surprisingly common.

You can find the ‘Poo Table’ (as it is un-technically called) in the excellent museum at Lyme Regis. It belonged to William Buckland, first Professor of Geology at Oxford University and later Dean of Westminster. He spent a lot of time in Lyme, working with the fossil hunter Mary Anning. One type of fossil they studied resembled strange round stones. Anning observing that were often found within – or very close to - the skeletons of the sea creatures she had excavated. Buckland reported to the scientific world that these were fossilised faecal matter from the sea creatures, opening up a whole new area of study.

William Buckland, c. 1845

 Despite this, the table in the Lyme museum does not appear to be made from coprolites from the Lyme area – they are more likely to have come from Edinburgh, from a trip Buckland made in 1834.

I would love to say that the reason I’ve chosen this table is because of its symbolism, as an artefact of an amazing time in scientific history. I could talk about the importance of the discovery of coprolites in understanding the reality of the prehistoric world. Or I could talk about the relationship between Mary Anning – who was, until recently, largely excised from the historical record - and the ‘scientific gentlemen’ like Buckland who often took the credit for describing and interpreting her discoveries.

Mary Anning (and dog Tray), before 1842

 But I’m afraid my motivations are considerably less academic. In the museum is the following label:

"[William Buckland’s] son Francis remembered this table in his father’s drawing room where ‘it was often admired by persons who had not the least idea of what they were looking at. I have seen in actual use ear-rings made of polished portions of coprolites… and have made out distinctly the scales and bones of the fish which once formed the dinner of a hideous lizard.’ The ‘belles’ who wore the ear-rings had no idea what they were made of."

Who can resist the idea of prim Victorian ladies placing their tea cups demurely on the Dean of Westminster’s side table, with no idea of what it was made of? Or wearing jewellery, thinking only that they were the height of fashion and not that they were wearing something which, if they had known, they would not be able to discuss in fashionable society? Even better, perhaps some of them knew perfectly well what they were doing, and the joke was on the more ignorant members of that society who admired them?

We can’t know – but it is tremendously good fun to speculate. At least it is if you have my childish sense of humour. In my own defence, it’s clear I’m not the only one to find the even the idea of coprolites entertaining. John Shute Duncan, a contemporary of Buckland, wrote the following verse (quoted in Deborah Cadbury’s ‘The Dinosaur Hunters’.)

“Approach, approach ingenuous youth

And learn this fundamental truth

The noble science of geology

Is firmly bottomed on Coprology”

Lavatory humour, it seems, like so much else, is not a modern invention.



Sources:

http://www.lymeregismuseum.co.uk/lrm/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/buckland.pdf

Deborah Cadbury - The Dinosaur Hunters: A true story of scientific rivalry and the discovery of the prehistoric world (Harper Collins, 2000)

Photos of Buckland and Anning from Wikimedia Commons.  Photo of coprolite table my own.

Cabinet of Curiosities - the First Dinosaur Fossils by Charlotte Wightwick

For today’s Cabinet of Curiosities we’re heading to the Natural History Museum in London. There are many, many objects there which I could quite happily add to the Cabinet, but I have chosen two small, unprepossessing brown fossils. Both are still half-embedded in light-coloured stone (‘matrix’); one is slightly curved, the other has defined grooves. They are both pretty obviously, even to the untrained observer, teeth.

What makes these teeth special is the fact that they were among the very first fossils to be identified as belonging to a previously-unknown race of large, land-dwelling reptiles: the creatures we now know as dinosaurs.

The iguanodon teeth found by Mary-Ann and/or Gideon Mantell. 

Now in the Natural History Museum, London. (Photo: Charlotte 

Wightwick)

Like many children, I was enthralled by the idea of a race of gigantic monsters inhabiting the earth millions of years before humans existed. But I never really thought much about how we originally found out about the dinosaurs.

My curiosity as an adult was piqued when I moved to Crystal Palace in south-east London. Walking in the local park one freezing-cold January day 12 years ago, I came across a small lake with an island at its centre, and on the island were various statues of prehistoric creatures, looming out of the wintry gloom. I was at once fascinated. Many of the models were clearly meant to be dinosaurs, but they looked nothing like the reconstructions I had been brought up with, even less like the newer depictions of the feathered, bird-like lizards we’re all starting to get our heads around.

How had they come to be there? Why did they look as they did? Above all, who were the people, what were the stories, which lay behind them?

Three of the Crystal Palace dinosaurs, seen from Dino Island, 

Nov 2016 (photo: Charlotte Wightwick). The differing colours

of the statues are a result of modern restoration work; the

Grade I listed statues are currently being repaired (e.g. you can 

see the damaged tail of the not-yet restored dinosaur in the 

foreground in comparison with the bright green and white 

of ‘Iggy’ the iguanodon at the back.)

These questions led me to the Natural History Museum and to the two small brown fossils with which I started this post.

The dinosaurs by the lake were created as part of the overall complex – some might say early ‘theme park’ – of the south London Crystal Palace. They were sculpted by Benjamin Waterhouse in the early 1850s, but their scientific accuracy (for they were extremely accurate, reflecting cutting-edge discoveries, no matter how odd they look to us now) was overseen by Professor Richard Owen. Today, Owen is largely unknown to the public imagination, but he was one of the leading scientific figures of his day. When he is remembered, it is chiefly for three things: for coining the term ‘dinosaur’, for disagreeing with Darwin (although for more complex reasons than is often assumed: he was no purely religious sceptic) and as the first head of the Natural History Museum. So he is one thread which takes us to South Kensington.

The statue of Richard Owen in the Natural 

History Museum (photo: Charlotte Wightwick)

But there is another thing which links the Crystal Palace dinosaurs to the iguanodon teeth. Owen, despite his undoubted expertise, was not the first choice for the job of superintending the creation of the Crystal Palace models.

Instead that honour went to an obscure GP, originally from Sussex, now living in near-poverty in Pimlico. Gideon Mantell had been fascinated by geology and fossil-collecting from childhood. Like Owen, he too had studied medicine in the capital as a young man but, failing to find a position there, returned to Lewes to take up a job as a GP, where he continued to work on his passion in his spare time.

In the early 1820s Gideon, (or more likely his wife Mary-Ann; there are conflicting accounts) found two small brown fossils.

Gideon realised that the teeth were something unusual and believed they were those of a large, unknown herbivorous reptile. He determined that the teeth most closely resembled those of a modern iguana and as such decided to call his new lizard ‘Iguanodon’ (literally ‘iguana-toothed’). Mantell spent several years trying to persuade the scientific community that he had discovered something new. Initially, he was met with widespread scepticism but his tenacity eventually paid off. Gideon went on to discover several more species of dinosaur and was recognised as one of the leading experts in this new and exciting field.

But Mantell’s life work came with a price. His obsession with fossils led to the disintegration of his marriage and financial ruin; a carriage accident followed by years of acrimonious dispute with a certain Professor Richard Owen took their toll on his health. As such he was too ill to oversee the creation of the Crystal Palace models. He died shortly before they – including his very own Iguanodon – were completed.

Portraits of Gideon and Mary-Ann Mantell reflected in the case 

of another of Gideon’s discoveries (the ‘Mantellisaurus’) at the 

Natural History Museum London. (Photo: Charlotte Wightwick)

Some years before his death, Mantell was forced through poverty to sell his extensive collection of fossils to the British Museum. When, more than forty years later, Richard Owen succeeded in splitting off the Natural History Museum, Mantell’s collection, including the teeth, went with him. There they remain on display still – two tiny, unremarkable-seeming fossils.

These iguanodon teeth are anything but insignificant, however. They are the objects which originally sparked our collective fascination with the dinosaurs and symbols of a world which had been lost and now could be uncovered by science. As importantly for me, they stand also for two complex and difficult men, Gideon Mantell and Richard Owen, who made it possible for me, and you, and all of us to wonder, in museums and in parks, about that long-lost world.