In the history of dinosaur palaeontology, naturalist and chemist Robert Plot, is credited as making the earliest (surviving) description and illustration of a dinosaur fossil. In the rather verbose The Natural History of Oxfordshire of 1676, addressed to King Charles II, Plot systematically records his observations of the heavens, air, waters, earths, stones, plants, men, women, arts and animals of Oxfordshire.

Chapter five of the book is about “Formed Stones” and it’s in this chapter that the “first dinosaur” is recorded. In a section describing formed stones reminiscent of the parts of humans, Plot describes and illustrates a stone in “... the figure of the lowermost part of the thigh-bone of Man or at least some other Animal ...” but larger in proportion than a horse or ox and different and smaller than an elephant. With some suspect deduction, Plot suggests that this must be from a giant man or woman and then gives an exhaustive account of giants known from history.

Plot’s illustration of a ‘giant man or woman bone’ thought to be the earliest illustration of a dinosaur fossil. From The Natural History of Oxfordshire.

Writing almost 100 years later, natural historian Richard Brookes copied Plot’s figure but gives it the name Scrotum humanum for its resemblance to the scrotum of a giant man, although this name was given to describe the form and not in the genuine belief that it was a giant’s scrotum (Weishampel and White 2003). Both of these illustrations would have to wait a further two hundred years until palaeontologist Beverly Halstead rediscovered these early works and recognised the giant thigh bone/scrotum as the femur of a theropod dinosaur and one of the earliest surviving depictions of a dinosaur fossil (Ibid.). Sadly the original specimen is lost.

Plot’s illustration of a dinosaur bone is quite well known as a point of historical interest but the rest of his musings on formed stones is less explored but quite remarkable. The formed stones that Plot describes range from funnily shaped stones – that wouldn’t be out of place in a child’s collection of beach-combed stones – through to accurately described fossils of ammonites, echinoderms, bivalves and crinoids.

Amongst some of the stranger inclusions from Oxfordshire is a stone from the quarries of Headington which resembles the head of a horse which Plot calls Hippocephaloides. Apparently these were found in abundance. Continuing on the theme of animorphic rocks, Lapis Bubonius is a stone which “has perfectly the head of an Owl’s head”.

Left: Lapis Bubonius owl’s head stone . Right: Hippocephaloides or horse head stone. From The Natural History of Oxfordshire.

Other objects in Plot’s collection are organised by their resemblance to human body parts such as an ear, an eyeball, a heart (including arteries and veins), olfactory nerves and a human brain. A separate group relates to stones which resemble the human Paps or Duggs including the Mamma, Papilla and Areola, that is a human breast. Plot notes that he did have a better one than the one figured but it was lost in the “...portage betwixt my Chamber and the Gravers”. From the inferior specimen illustrated a sponge or coral is a more likely candidate. Plot also describes stones in the form of the Scrotum, Phalloides, glans and praeputium penis humani but “out of modesty” he didn’t figure it.

Formed stones shaped after human body parts. Brain, olfactory nerve, eye, ear and breast. From The Natural History of Oxfordshire.

In addition to the more exotic formed stones, there are a range of more recognisable animal fossils such as the bivalves, ammonites (which Plot notes are different to the nautilus), echinoderms, gastropods and belemnites. These caused Plot a bit of head scratching as they clearly resembled living forms which are found in the sea but he found them in the earth in Oxfordshire. In the introduction to the chapter, Plot compares these naturally formed stones to the stones which can be worked for human use and supposes that these stones were provided for the admiration by humans rather than use. In what we must presume is a case of sour grapes, he also chastises those “malicious scoffers” who deride the habit of “picking of stones’ for not admiring God’s creative work.



This is not to suggest that Plot blindly accepts that these fossils and stones were distributed in the ground and he spends several pages theorising as to how the remains of sea animals ended up on land. He notes that some fossils seem to be endocasts of shells - where the whole animal has been replaced with rock - but then some fossils found inland had nacre or unmodified shell so could not be ancient. The great flood of the Noah legend, Plot notes, only covered Asia(?) so perhaps England was subject to later national floods in which marine animals were deposited on land, buried and replaced by stones in full or part. Alternatively the shells could have been transported by earthquakes which caused disruption and land uplift.

It seems strange to have elements of mysticism and innocent observation of stones which look like owls and horses in The Natural History of Oxfordshire next to impressive conclusions and deduction about environmental change in the past with far less evidence than we have today, over 300 years later. Following the publication of The Natural History of Oxfordshire, Robert Plot’s insightful observations (for the time) were enough to lead to his election to the Royal Society of London and later he became the Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford University.

References



Plot, R. 1676. The Natural History of Oxfordshire being an Essay towards the Natural History of England. Available on the web via the Biodiversity Heritage Library.

Weishampel, D. B and White, N. M. 2003. The Dinosaur Papers 1676-1906. Smithsonian Books.