Dear colleagues

 

I am writing to ask, please, whether anyone has seen a cast of this particular plesiosaur from Watchet, north Somerset, in their or indeed any museum collection - or just on the wall in an old photo of your museum?

 

The specimen (8348) was originally collected by the Rev. David Williams (1792-1850) of Bleadon whose collection was one of the first acquisitions of the Somerset Archaeological and Natural History Society in the early 1850s. It was on display at the Castle in Taunton for many years but was dismantled in a mid-20th century refurbishment and rediscovered piecemeal in the Somerset County Museum collection in the 1980s. There has arisen a question about whether a head found loose in the collection is part of it, and comparison with a cast of the original specimen would be helpful. We are also interested in the matter for curatorial and collections-historical purposes, as well as vertebrate palaeontological research.

 

Mark Evans has spotted a cast of this specimen in old images of the room holding Charles Moore's collection at the Royal Literary and Scientific Institution at Bath. This cast is now lost (unsurprisingly, given the problems the RLSI had over much of the 20th century). However, this raises the possibility that other casts exist. As the original specimen was not published till very recently, the casts are very possibly unidentified to this day, probably labelled as some species of Plesiosaurus (though the original has now been made the type specimen of Eoplesiosaurus antiquior). It is not known when the casts would have been made or whether they would have been given or sold to the recipient under Williams's name or that of the SANHS; Williams died in 1850. 

 

The specimen has a distinctive, as if startled or constipated, air about it, as is seen on the attached image kindly provided by Roger Benson from his recent PLOS One paper with Mark Evans and Pat Druckenmiller, with permission of Dennis Parsons of Somerset County Museum. Note that the angles between the various parts can vary according to the mount - the original  and the Bath cast are slightly but noticeably different.

 

More generally I would always be interested to see pictures and details of unidentified casts of ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs, especially from the Lias (Lower Jurassic) of England,  especially as such casts are sometimes the only record of specimens that have since been destroyed.

 

With apologies for any crossposting,

 

Mike Taylor