The plesiosaur's birthplace: the Bristol Institution and its contribution to vertebrate palaeontology

Abstract

The Bristol Institution for the Advancement of Science, Literature and the Arts opened in 1823. The science expounded at the Institution was an anti-Lamarckian ideology based on Paleyan natural dieology and the Aristotelean Great Chain of Being. Pioneering work on Jurassic marine reptiles by W. D. Conybeare and H. T. De la Beche in 1821–1824 used material from its collection, and it was at the Institution that Conybeare first publicly announced the discovery of the first complete plesiosaur. In the early 1830s, Henry Riley and the second curator Samuel Stutchbury first described Permo-Triassic reptiles including Thecodontosaurus. Riley was one of the earliest exponents of Geoffroyan comparative anatomy in Britain. The Institution declined under financial pressures, eventually to be taken over by Bristol City Council in 1894. Its main contribution to science was its collection of fossil and Recent vertebrates. Louis Agassiz drew upon its fossil fishes for Poissans fossiles, and Richard Owen used the reptiles for his British Association Report of 1841–1843. Much of the collection was destroyed in 1940 but much also remains.

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