#robert plot

Robert Plot – Scientist of the Day

Robert Plot, an English naturalist and antiquarian, was born Dec. 13, 1640, in Kent.  

"He donated to the museum the great variety of material... He also gave many minerals, and ancient objects...and also a fair number of exotic items such as shells, minerals, metals, earths, salts, stones, tufa, sponges, corals and many other things of that kind ...These he willingly donated to the museum and generously dedicated them to advance the cause of the natural sciences."

This excerpt comes from the Ashmolean Museum's Book of Benefactors describing Robert Plots gifts to the Museum. Robert Plot was the first keeper of the Ashmolean Museum, and was born on this day in 1640. He was a naturalist with a keen interest in the study of antiquities, and was also the first professor of Chemistry at the University of Oxford.

Also below is a portrait of Plot, a record of the gifts he donated to the museum and his rather unconventional signature in a book of accounts.

Robert Plot was born in December 1640 and baptized on 13 December, which many have quite reasonably taken to be his birthday. Plot lived a remarkable life, becoming first Keeper of the Ashmolean, Oxford’s first professor of Chemistry and the secretary of the Royal Society, and happily taking on the appellation of “the learned Dr Plot.”

His book The Natural History of Oxford-shire of 1676, addressed to King Charles II, is almost as impressive as its author. Amongst its many noteworthy passages is the first known description of a dinosaur bone, though Plot did not know what exactly he was detailing.

Come we next to such as concern the Members of the Body: Amongst which, I have one dug out of a quarry in the Parish of Cornwell, and given me by the ingenious Sir Thomas Pennyston, that has exactly the Figure of the lowermost part of the Thigh-Bone of a Man or at least of some other Animal...

Not sure where the bone might have originated, Plot spends several pages recounting the various anecdotes of giants that he has heard or read, and also tries to reason out how an elephant bone might have ended up buried in Cornwall.

Sadly, the specimen is now lost but from the engraving that has survived, paleontologists have subsequently deduced that Plot was describing the fossilised femur of a Megalosaurus.

We have digitized The Natural History of Oxfordshire in full and posted it online for your perusal. The portrait of Plot at the head of this post also comes from the Bodleain Libraries’ collections, as hosted online by Art UK.

Dinosaurs seem to have an enduring fascination for children these days, although I do not recall them being big during my childhood over sixty years ago. There is something compelling about these large creatures tramping around the prehistoric Earth but perhaps equally fascinating is the thought that at some point those of a scientific mind must have begun to recognise that our planet had been…