Thomas Hawkins was an English

England

England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

 fossil

Fossil

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

 collector and dealer especially of Ichyosaurs

Ichthyosaur

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

 and Plesiosaurs.

He lived in Glastonbury

Glastonbury

Glastonbury is a small town in Somerset, England, situated at a dry point on the low lying Somerset Levels, south of Bristol. The town, which is in the Mendip district, had a population of 8,784 in the 2001 census...

.Hawkins paid for fossils exposed by erosion at 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...

 on the Dorset Coast, and quarrymen at inland quarries at Street

Street, Somerset

Street is a small village and civil parish in the county of Somerset, England. It is situated on a dry spot in the Somerset Levels, at the end of the Polden Hills, south-west of Glastonbury. The 2001 census records the village as having a population of 11,066...

 and Edgarley in Somerset. He also collected geological specimens on the Isle of Wight

Isle of Wight

The Isle of Wight is a county and the largest island of England, located in the English Channel, on average about 2–4 miles off the south coast of the county of Hampshire, separated from the mainland by a strait called the Solent...

.
His early collection was sold to the Natural History Museum

British Museum

The British Museum is a museum of human history and culture in London. Its collections, which number more than seven million objects, are amongst the largest and most comprehensive in the world and originate from all continents, illustrating and documenting the story of human culture from its...

 for £3,000. Hawkins published a number of texts between the 1830s and 1850s. The two best known are Memoirs of Icthyosaurii and Plesiosaurii (1835) and The Book of the Great Sea Dragons - full title The book of the great sea-dragons, Ichthyosauri and Plesiosauri, [gedolim taninim] gedolim taninim, of Moses. Extinct monsters of the ancient earth. With thirty plates, copied from skeletons in the author's collection of fossil organic remains, (deposited in the British museum.) (London, W. Pickering, 1840).
He is buried in Ventnor

Ventnor

Ventnor is a seaside resort and civil parish established in the Victorian era on the south coast of the Isle of Wight, England. It lies underneath St Boniface Down , and is built on steep slopes and cliffs leading down to the sea...

 on the Isle of Wight. Hawkins was a Fellow

Fellow

A fellow in the broadest sense is someone who is an equal or a comrade. The term fellow is also used to describe a person, particularly by those in the upper social classes. It is most often used in an academic context: a fellow is often part of an elite group of learned people who are awarded...

 of the Geological Society of London

Geological Society of London

The Geological Society of London is a learned society based in the United Kingdom with the aim of "investigating the mineral structure of the Earth"...

.

External links

• The Book of the Great Sea Dragons Complete text all plates.