ENVISIONING DEEP TIME: HENRY DE LA BECHE’S CONTRIBUTIONS TO SCIENTIFIC VISUALIZATION

Henry Thomas De la Beche (1796-1855), the first director of the eventual British Geological Survey, authored several geology texts. In addition to being a talented geologist and author, De la Beche possessed considerable artistic skills and personally drew his illustrations; his books are more prolifically illustrated than other geology texts in the Golden Age of Geology (1788-1840) (Clary, 2003). In 1830, when fossil collector Mary Anning (1799-1847) experienced financial troubles, De la Beche drew a reconstructed scene of the organisms that had been collected as fossils by Anning. Using both fossils and contextual clues, De la Beche created Duria antiquior (Ancient Dorset), a Jurassic scene based on the available science. The interactions of the extinct organisms are depicted, and De la Beche even included the process of fossil formation: skeletons and shells rest on the sea bottom, while a defecating plesiosaurus contributes future coprolites. A further graphic innovation of the illustration is the perspective. De la Beche utilized an aquarium view, in which the viewer is peering through the water. This pioneering novelty occurred decades before Victorian parlor aquariums were popularized (Clary & Wandersee, 2005; Gould, 1998). The Duria antiquior lithograph was sold at a substantial £2 10s as a fund raiser for Anning. While the price restricted its purchase to wealthier customers, the lithograph became the first reconstructed scene from Deep Time that was ever published (Rudwick, 1992). Georges Cuvier attempted reconstructions of soft anatomy of various extinct animals, but his sketches were not published during his lifetime (Rudwick, 1997).

In 1833, De la Beche further contributed the first widely circulated scenes from Deep Time. The French translation of A Geological Manual includes three illustrated vignettes of extinct life in modest format. Today, our visualizations of extinct organisms—such as Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park movies—can be traced to the early innovative graphics pioneered by Henry De la Beche.