Duria Antiquior, a more ancient Dorset

Dorset

Dorset , is a county in South West England on the English Channel coast. The county town is Dorchester which is situated in the south. The Hampshire towns of Bournemouth and Christchurch joined the county with the reorganisation of local government in 1974...

, was the first pictorial representation of a scene of prehistoric life based on evidence from fossil

Fossil

Fossils are the preserved remains or traces of animals , plants, and other organisms from the remote past...

 reconstructions, which is now commonly known as paleoart

Paleoart

Paleoart is an informal term first coined by Mark Hallett for art that depicts subjects related to paleontology. These may be representations of fossil remains or depictions of the living creatures and their ecosystems....

. The first version was a watercolour painted in 1830 by the English geologist Henry De la Beche

Henry De la Beche

Sir Henry Thomas De la Beche FRS was an English geologist and palaeontologist who helped pioneer early geological survey methods.-Biography:...

 based on fossils found in Lyme Regis

Lyme Regis

Lyme Regis is a coastal town in West Dorset, England, situated 25 miles west of Dorchester and east of Exeter. The town lies in Lyme Bay, on the English Channel coast at the Dorset-Devon border...

 mostly by the professional fossil collector Mary Anning

Mary Anning

Mary Anning was a British fossil collector, dealer and palaeontologist who became known around the world for a number of important finds she made in the Jurassic age marine fossil beds at Lyme Regis where she lived...

. De la Beche had the professional artist Georg Scharf

George Johann Scharf

George Johann Scharf was a water color painter, draughtsman and lithographer, and father of Sir George Scharf and Henry Scharf. He exhibited his paintings at the Royal Academy from 1817 to 1850, and was a member of the New Society of Painters in Water Colours.-Early life:George Scharf was born in...

 produce lithographic prints based on the painting, which he sold to friends to raise money for Anning's benefit. It was the first scene from deep time

Deep time

Deep time is the concept that the Geologic time scale is vast because the Earth is very old. The modern philosophical concept was developed in the 18th century by Scottish geologist James Hutton...

 to see even limited publication. The print was used for educational purposes and widely circulated in scientific circles; it influenced several other such depictions that began to appear in both scientific and popular literature. Several later versions were produced.

Origin of the painting and the lithograph

By 1830 Mary Anning was well known to the leading British geologists and fossil collectors for her ability to spot important fossils in the Jurassic

Jurassic

The Jurassic is a geologic period and system that extends from about Mya to  Mya, that is, from the end of the Triassic to the beginning of the Cretaceous. The Jurassic constitutes the middle period of the Mesozoic era, also known as the age of reptiles. The start of the period is marked by...

 lime stone and shale formations around the resort town of Lyme Regis on the Dorset coast, and for her knowledge and skill in collecting, reconstructing and preparing them. William Conybeare’s scientific description of some of the marine reptile fossils she had found, including the first ichthyosaur

Ichthyosaur

Ichthyosaurs were giant marine reptiles that resembled fish and dolphins...

 skeleton to be recognized for what it was and the first two plesiosaur

Plesiosaur

Plesiosauroidea is an extinct clade of carnivorous plesiosaur marine reptiles. Plesiosauroids, are known from the Jurassic and Cretaceous Periods...

 skeletons ever found, had created a sensation in scientific circles. William Buckland

William Buckland

The Very Rev. Dr William Buckland DD FRS was an English geologist, palaeontologist and Dean of Westminster, who wrote the first full account of a fossil dinosaur, which he named Megalosaurus...

 credited Anning with two key observations about certain odd fossils, that they were sometimes found in the abdominal regions of ichthyosaur skeletons, and that they often contained fossilized fish scales and bones (and sometimes the bones of small ichthyosaurs), which led him to conclude that coprolites were fossilized feces. This discovery led Buckland to write a vivid description of the Lias food chain. It was this description that motivated the geologist Henry De la Beche

Henry De la Beche

Sir Henry Thomas De la Beche FRS was an English geologist and palaeontologist who helped pioneer early geological survey methods.-Biography:...

, who had worked with Conybeare describing the marine reptile fossils, to create a pictorial representation of life in ancient Dorset.

Despite her renown in geologic circles, in 1830 Anning was having financial difficulties due to hard economic times in Britain, and the long and unpredictable intervals between major fossil finds. Impressed by the positive reaction from his friends to his initial watercolour painting, De la Beche decided to assist Anning by having the professional illustrator Georg Scharf, who had earlier done lithographs of Conybeare's sketches of plesiosaur and ichthyosaur skeletons, create a lithographic print based on his original. He then sold copies of the print to friends and colleagues at the price of £2 10s each and donated the proceeds to Anning.

Prior to Duria Antiquior Georges Cuvier

Georges Cuvier

Georges Chrétien Léopold Dagobert Cuvier or Jean Léopold Nicolas Frédéric Cuvier , known as Georges Cuvier, was a French naturalist and zoologist...

 had published drawings of what he believed certain prehistoric creatures would have looked like in life. Conybeare had drawn a famous cartoon of Buckland sticking his head into a den of prehistoric hyenas in honour of his well known analysis of the excavation at Kirkdale Cave

Kirkdale Cave

Kirkdale Cave is a cave located in Kirkdale near Kirkbymoorside in the Vale of Pickering, North Yorkshire, England. The cave was discovered by workmen in 1821, and was found to contain fossilized bones of a variety of mammals not currently found in Great Britain, including hippopotamus, the...

, but Duria Antiquior was the first depiction of a scene from deep time showing a variety of prehistoric creatures interacting with one another and their environment based on fossil evidence.

Composition

Many of the creatures are depicted in violent interaction. The central figures are a large ichthyosaur biting into the long neck of a plesiosaur. Another plesiosaur is seen trying to surprise a crocodile on the shore, and yet another is using its long neck to seize a pterosaur

Pterosaur

Pterosaurs were flying reptiles of the clade or order Pterosauria. They existed from the late Triassic to the end of the Cretaceous Period . Pterosaurs are the earliest vertebrates known to have evolved powered flight...

 flying above the water. This emphasis on violent interactions in nature was typical of the Regency era. De la Beche translated Conybeare's verbal description of marine reptiles into pictorial form. Several of the ichthyosaurs are depicted seizing various fish whose scales and bones had been found in coprolites and a couple are shown excreting the feces that will become the coprolites of the future. In addition to the vetebrates there were several invetebrates shown including belemites depicted as squid like and an ammonite

Ammonite

Ammonite, as a zoological or paleontological term, refers to any member of the Ammonoidea an extinct subclass within the Molluscan class Cephalopoda which are more closely related to living coleoids Ammonite, as a zoological or paleontological term, refers to any member of the Ammonoidea an extinct...

 represented as floating creature along the lines of a paper nautilus

Argonaut (animal)

The argonauts are a group of pelagic octopuses. They are also called paper nautiluses, referring to the paper-thin eggcase that females secrete...

. There are also more recognizable empty ammontie shells on the sea bottom, and some stalked crinoid

Crinoid

Crinoids are marine animals that make up the class Crinoidea of the echinoderms . Crinoidea comes from the Greek word krinon, "a lily", and eidos, "form". They live both in shallow water and in depths as great as 6,000 meters. Sea lilies refer to the crinoids which, in their adult form, are...

s (sea lilies), of which some very finely preserved fossils had been found at Lyme Regis, are depicted in the lower right corner. One of the features of the painting that has most struck historians is the split level view that shows action both above and below the surface of the water. This is known as an aquarium view, and Duria Antiquior is the first known example; the style would not become common until the Victorian aquarium craze a couple of decades later.

Circulation, use, and influence

The prints proved quite popular, and at some point the lithograph was redrawn and a larger run printed; in some of the later versions the figures were numbered. William Buckland kept a supply of the prints on hand and circulated them at his geology lectures. Copies were soon sent to geologists outside of Britain, including Cuvier in France.

A print also apparently reached Germany, as in 1831 August Goldfuss included a similar drawing, clearly influenced by De la Beche's work, of a scene out of the Jurassic

Jurassic

The Jurassic is a geologic period and system that extends from about Mya to  Mya, that is, from the end of the Triassic to the beginning of the Cretaceous. The Jurassic constitutes the middle period of the Mesozoic era, also known as the age of reptiles. The start of the period is marked by...

 based on fossils from the Jura Mountains

Jura mountains

The Jura Mountains are a small mountain range located north of the Alps, separating the Rhine and Rhone rivers and forming part of the watershed of each...

 in the latest chapter of the serial publication of his Fossils of Germany. Buckland wrote to De la Beche urging him to create more scenes before the Germans used up all the best ideas. De la Beche didn't produce any other scenes on such a scale, but he did include several much smaller and simpler scenes of prehistoric life in the second edition of his Geological Manual (1832). Such scenes didn't remain confined to scientific circles. In 1833 the geologist John Phillips

John Phillips (geologist)

John Phillips FRS was an English geologist.- Life and work :Philips was born at Marden in Wiltshire...

 produced a wood cut of an elaborate prehistoric scene, that was obviously influenced by both Duria Antiquior and Goldfuss's Jurassic scene, for publication in the popular Penny Magazine

Penny Magazine

The Penny Magazine, published every Saturday from 31 March 1832 to 31 October 1845, was an illustrated British magazine aimed at the working class. Charles Knight created it for the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge in response to Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, which started two months...

, and another illustration which borrowed elements from Duria Antiquior appeared in a French illustrated dictionary of natural history in 1834. Such scenes from deep time vividly illustrated advances in paleontology, and helped convince scholars and even the general public that the deep past could be understood with a reasonable degree of confidence.

Later versions of the scene

The Swiss professor of geology Francois Jules Pictet de la Rive had a small version of Duria Antiquior redrawn for inclusion in the last volume of his Elementary Treatise on Paleontology (1844–1846). It was accurate to the De la Beche - Scharf lithograph except that it omitted the feces. This was the first version of the image to be published in a book. Sometime around 1850 Robert Farren painted a large version of the scene in oil on canvas for Adam Sedgwick

Adam Sedgwick

Adam Sedgwick was one of the founders of modern geology. He proposed the Devonian period of the geological timescale...

. Sedgwick may have used it as a prop in his geology lectures at Cambridge. In 2007 the Lyme Regis artist Richard Bizley worked with David Ward to produce an updated version of the scene that reflected modern scientific knowledge of the creatures depicted. In Lyme Regis Museum

Lyme Regis Museum

The Lyme Regis Museum is a local museum in the town of Lyme Regis on the Jurassic Coast in Dorset, England....

 there is a large three-dimensional diorama

Diorama

The word diorama can either refer to a nineteenth century mobile theatre device, or, in modern usage, a three-dimensional full-size or miniature model, sometimes enclosed in a glass showcase for a museum...

based on Duria Antiquior, created by artist Darrell Wakelam in partnership with local children.

External links

• Richard Bizley's interpretation of the scene updated based on modern scientific ideas.
• Article on the original watercolour at the National Museums & Galleries of Wales.