upper classes that a whole new vocation sprang up. A “fossilist” was
someone who made a living hunting up specimens for wealthy patrons.
The same year Cuvier published his Recherches, one such fossilist, a young
woman named Mary Anning, discovered a particularly outlandish
specimen. The creature’s skull, found in the limestone cliffs of Dorset, was
nearly four feet long, with a jaw shaped like a pair of needle-nose pliers.
Its eye sockets, peculiarly large, were covered with bony plates.
The first ichthyosaur fossil to be discovered was exhibited at London’s Egyptian Hall.
The fossil ended up in London at the Egyptian Hall, a privately owned
museum not unlike Peale’s. It was put on exhibit as a fish and then as a
relative of a platypus before being recognized as a new kind of reptile—an
ichthyosaur, or “fish-lizard.” A few years later, other specimens collected
by Anning yielded pieces of another, even wilder creature, dubbed a
plesiosaur, or “almost-lizard.” Oxford’s first professor of geology, the
Reverend William Buckland, described the plesiosaur as having “the head
of a lizard,” joined to a neck “resembling the body of a Serpent,” the “ribs
of a Chameleon, and the paddles of a Whale.” Apprised of the find, Cuvier
found the account of the plesiosaur so outrageous that he questioned
whether the specimens had been doctored. When Anning uncovered
another, nearly complete plesiosaur fossil, he was, once again, quickly
informed of the finding, at which point he had to acknowledge that he’d
been wrong. “One shouldn’t anticipate anything more monstrous to
emerge,” he wrote to one of his English correspondents. During Cuvier’s
visit to England, he went to visit Oxford, where Buckland showed him yet
another astonishing fossil: an enormous jaw with one curved tooth