A DOUBLE ANNIVERSARY: THE PLANNED 2019 PUBLICATION OF WILLIAM SMITH’S FOSSILS REUNITED (Invited Presentation)

2019 will see the publication of a truly remarkable volume, 200 years after William Smith was forced first sell his fossil collections, and then abandon plans to finish his two ground-breaking volumes which had founded stratigraphical paleontology. Peter Wigley of Lynx Geographic Information Systems Ltd, London, [any related enquiries to pwigley@atlas.co.uk], who has already performed digital wonders to bring Smith’s mapping achievements to proper notice (see GSA Today, July 2016. pp. 4-10), has co-ordinated this new volume. It will include the full digitized texts and wonderful plates engraved by James Sowerby (1757 – 1822) of the only four (of an intended seven) parts of Smith’s published books Strata Identified by Organized Fossils (=SIOF) from June 1816 to June 1819) and the first (and only of two) part of his Stratigraphical System (=SS) of August 1817 [on the fossil collections Smith had been forced to sell to the British Museum]. These were all his stretched resources could get into print before his incarceration in a London Debtors’ Prison in 1819.

Leslie Cox had recorded in 1942 that manuscripts giving details of the three final parts for SIOF and preliminary sketches for its four intended plates had survived in Oxford. This new volume will include all this never-published material, with a new table showing the distribution of ammonites which Smith intended to use in SS. Additionally, thanks to the efforts of staff at London’s Natural History Museum, where the great majority of Smith’s fossil collections still survive, we have been able to recreate digital photographic plates, which now allow direct comparisons of the Smith fossils in the same format as the engraved plates from 200 years previously. The volume will also included a listing of all Smith’s known fossil localities on a series of new maps. Since the last part of these Smith publications was issued in June 1819, this new publication can celebrate the 200^th anniversary of that sad event and the 250th of Smith’s birth in Oxfordshire in March 1769. It will hopefully make a fine contribution towards demonstrating the complete "Evolution of Paleontological Art", over these 200 years.