Five Pounds More

Colonel Birch had offered a hundred guineas without seeing the fossil. Sir Henry Bunbury had written first. Mary Anning gave Bunbury the prior claim, but there was a difficulty: if she sold him the skeleton for the same amount she had refused from Birch, Birch might think she had treated him badly. In her letter of December 1823, she asked Bunbury for one hundred and ten pounds.

A guinea was worth a pound and a shilling. Birch’s hundred guineas therefore amounted to £105; the extra £5 would make Bunbury’s purchase a different proposition. Anning explained the distinction herself. She was negotiating the sale of an animal whose anatomy was about to trouble some of Europe’s most experienced naturalists, while attending carefully to what one customer might think of her dealings with another.

The object was a plesiosaur, an extinct marine reptile. Anning had found its near-complete skeleton at Lyme Regis, on the Dorset coast of southern England, on 10 December 1823. She was twenty-four. The tiny head, exceptionally long neck and four paddles belonged to an animal unlike any living creature her customers could inspect. Enough of it remained connected for the relationships between those parts to be examined in stone.

Two customers, one skeleton

Selling fossils was the Anning family’s business. Mary’s father Richard, a cabinetmaker, had collected and sold specimens from the cliffs as a sideline. After his death in 1810, her mother kept the trade going; her brother Joseph also made important finds. Their customers wanted objects that required local knowledge to find and considerable work to uncover. A promising piece of bone was still embedded in material that had to be removed without destroying what made it valuable.

Birch had helped the family before. In 1820 he organised a London auction of fossils he had bought from them and gave the proceeds, about £400, to the Annings. His offer for the plesiosaur came from an established relationship. Bunbury, a soldier, historian and early member of London’s Geological Society, was another customer whose interests Mary knew.

Her first surviving letter about this sale, dated 19 December, gave Bunbury the skeleton’s measurements and described its scientific interest. She also offered him a smaller ichthyosaur, comparing its quality with specimens he had already seen. If he was travelling nearby, she suggested that the fossils justified a small diversion. The new discovery sat within a working stock of specimens and an ongoing conversation with a buyer.

The second letter, dated 26 December, supplied a drawing. Anning called it a rough sketch, but its task was precise: give Bunbury an idea of a large, heavy object he had not seen. Beneath the long-necked skeleton she wrote her scale, one inch to each foot. The bones could travel on paper while the stone remained at Lyme.

Anning directed his attention to the unusually small head and long neck. She compared their proportions with the existing ideas about the relationship between plesiosaurs and ichthyosaurs, the other marine reptiles found along this coast. Her account combined the evidence of exposed bones with a judgement about what those bones meant.

Then came the offer from Birch and her reason for asking Bunbury more. She was willing to explain both her intended price and the social calculation behind changing it. Bunbury and his wife had also sent a present, for which she thanked them. Scientific specimens, gifts and commercial obligations passed through the same correspondence.

Getting the animal out

The December letters begin with a skeleton sufficiently exposed to measure and draw. They do not supply a diary of this excavation. The exact tools, helpers and sequence of preparation cannot be filled in from the fact that Anning was an experienced collector. Her own account of another plesiosaur, a few years later, gives a much closer view of what the work could demand.

Writing to Charlotte Murchison in February 1829, Anning described becoming so intent on extracting part of a fossil that she and the man she had employed to assist her were nearly drowned by the rising tide. Afterwards, she asked why he had not warned her. He said he had been ashamed to admit his fear when she seemed unconcerned. Anning recalled their bedraggled appearance and said that thinking about it made her cold.

Murchison was herself a fossil collector and had spent time sketching and searching with Anning. She also helped connect Mary with prospective buyers. In the same letter as the tide incident, Anning priced an ichthyosaur head at £5 and a large ammonite at £1, asking whether the latter would suit another collector. Extraction and the next sale occupied the same sheet of paper.

For the 1823 plesiosaur, the drawing was particularly useful because the animal had already been proposed from less satisfactory remains. In 1821 Henry De la Beche and William Daniel Conybeare had described the genus Plesiosaurus from fragmentary evidence. The new skeleton could test how well those separated bones had been understood.

An improbable neck

Conybeare recognised the danger of constructing an animal from pieces that did not belong together. In his 1824 account, he acknowledged that an inexperienced comparative anatomist might be suspected of combining incongruous parts from different species. He considered the new Lyme specimen a confirmation of his earlier conclusions about the skeleton’s organisation.

The distinction matters. A reconstructed drawing can arrange bones into a regular, intelligible animal. A fossil with bones still associated supplies evidence for that arrangement. Anning’s specimen linked the small skull and long succession of neck vertebrae to the body and paddles. The neck was roughly as long as the body and tail together. Those proportions were the discovery’s attraction and a reason to question it.

Georges Cuvier, the influential French comparative anatomist, initially doubted whether the apparently associated parts really made one animal. Further information from Conybeare and the Oxford geologist William Buckland helped convince him. The objection was consequential: an assembled composite could not establish the anatomy of an extinct creature in the same way as a connected skeleton. Mary’s drawing and the physical fossil were being asked to carry that distinction across a distance.

Buckland also helped find a purchaser. On his advice, Richard Grenville, the first Duke of Buckingham, bought the specimen. The surviving request to Bunbury fixes what Mary was asking him; later accounts disagree about what the Duke ultimately paid. The ownership is clearer than the final sum.

The fossil travelled to London for the Geological Society’s meeting on 20 February 1824, when Conybeare presented it. The Society then occupied narrow residential premises in Bedford Street near Covent Garden. Conybeare’s published paper named the skeleton’s aristocratic owner, but did not name Anning.

A copy for Oxford

Private ownership did not end the specimen’s usefulness. The Duke allowed Buckland to borrow it so that a plaster cast could be made. In 1831 the sculptor Francis Chantrey and Thomas Jones, the specialist who handled plaster work in Chantrey’s studio, produced a teaching copy. The cast survives at Oxford University Museum of Natural History.

The copy made the animal’s form available without requiring the Duke’s fossil to remain in an Oxford classroom. Students could examine the relationships that had made the original so useful: head, neck, trunk and limbs held together as one skeleton. A specimen sold into a private collection acquired another working life through the skills of people accustomed to reproducing form in plaster.

In 1848 the original was purchased from the Buckingham estate for the British Museum. It is now at London’s Natural History Museum, identified as Plesiosaurus dolichodeirus and serving as the species’ holotype, the specimen that anchors its scientific name. Anning had died the previous year. The fossil she had offered through carefully worded letters was entering a national collection; her drawing remained with the account of a possible sale.