Page "Mary Anning" Paragraph 48

Other ichthyosaur remains had been discovered in years past at Lyme and elsewhere, but the specimen found by the Annings was the first to come to the attention of scientific circles in London.

It was purchased by the lord of a local manor, who passed it to William Bullock for public display in London where it created a sensation.

At a time when most people in Britain still believed in a literal interpretation of Genesis, that the earth was only a few thousand years old and that species did not evolve or become extinct, the find raised questions in scientific and religious circles about what the new science of geology was revealing about ancient life and the history of the earth.

Its notoriety increased when Sir Everard Home wrote a series of six papers, starting in 1814, describing it for the Royal Society.

The papers never mentioned who had collected the fossil, and in the first one he even mistakenly credited the painstaking cleaning and preparation of the fossil performed by Anning to the staff at Bullock ’ s museum.

Perplexed by the creature, Home kept changing his mind about its classification, first thinking it was a kind of fish, then thinking it might have some kind of affinity with the duck-billed platypus ( only recently known to science ); finally in 1819 he reasoned it might be a kind of intermediate form between salamanders and lizards, which led him to propose naming it Proteo-Saurus.

By then Charles Konig, an assistant curator of the British Museum, had already suggested the name Ichthyosaurus ( fish lizard ) for the specimen and that name stuck.

Konig purchased the skeleton for the museum in 1819.

The skull of the specimen is still in the possession of the Natural History Museum in London ( to which the fossil collections of the British Museum were transferred later in the century ), but at some point, it became separated from the rest of the skeleton, the location of which is not known.