THE PIONEERING ILLUSTRATION OF THE PALEONTOLOGICAL RECONSTRUCTION REVOLUTION: DE LA BECHE’S DURIA ANTIQUIOR

Prior to the mid-nineteenth century, fossils were illustrated just as they had been collected. A sketch of invertebrate fossils, such as brachiopods, mollusks, and even corals, closely resembled the organisms as they appeared in life. However, this was not the case with vertebrates. Paleontologists might assemble the individual bones into a correct (or incorrect) sequence, but soft tissue anatomy was unpreserved and, therefore, not included in the illustration. This changed in 1830 with Henry Thomas De la Beche’s (1796-1855) ground-breaking illustration, Duria antiquior (ancient Dorset). Drawn as a fund-raiser for fossil collector Mary Anning (1799-1847), De la Beche’s graphic recreated a Jurassic scene with the fossil organisms that Anning collected at Lyme Regis. Although Georges Cuvier had previously sketched reconstructed soft parts of organisms in his notebooks, his illustrations were unpublished, making Duria the first published scene of extinct life. Not only was the illustration a milestone in its depiction of extinct reptiles, but the scene was also a breakthrough with the viewpoint in which the extinct organisms are shown: The viewer is looking through the water at plesiosaurs and ichthyosaurs that lived in the Jurassic sea. In 1833, De la Beche also included sketches of extinct vertebrates in the French edition of A Geological Manual, but none are as detailed as Duria, and none included the aquarium viewpoint—even within the vignette scene of a plesiosaur and a pterosaur. Other geologists and illustrators similarly continued to depict marine organisms with an overhead, bird’s eye view. After the introduction of parlor aquaria in Victorian society two decades later, illustrations did not immediately include a dual air-water phase depiction. Today, the aquarium view graphic is the default viewpoint in modern geology textbooks. Even though illustrators were not quick to adopt all aspects of De la Beche’s revolutionary graphic, Duria antiquior can be acknowledged as the pioneering graphic from which organisms’ reconstructions and modern animations trace their origins.