LOT 0397

Bifacial Partial Fossil Ichthyosaur Jaw

MESOZOIC-JURASSIC PERIOD, CIRCA 250-90 MILLION YEARS B.P.

4 1/8 in. (270 grams, 10.6 cm).

Showing multiple sharp teeth and a section of well-formed, slender jaws.

Discovered at Lyme Regis, UK, during the time of Mary Anning and her family.
From an old English collection.
Ian Wilkinson collection, Nottinghamshire, UK, formed since 1985.

With an original early 19th-century handwritten identification label ‘Nose of a Saurian’, the original discovery of this fossil can be dated to the period 1800-1830.

Originally, ichthyosaur fossils were misidentified as ‘Saurian’ - being either lizards or forms of crocodile. The term 'Ichthyosaur' was first used in 1817 by the German naturalist Karl Dietrich Eberhard Konig, and he did not publish the name until 1825. By the 1830’s, the name Ichthyosaur was widely used. Having been discovered in Lyme Regis, this dates the discovery of the fossil to the ‘Golden Age’ of fossil hunting in the early 1800s (before the use of the name ‘ichthyosaur’) made especially famous by Mary Anning and her family, who collected fossils from the coast around Lyme Regis and who sold specimens, for additional income, to tourists as well as leading naturalists and fossil collectors from around the world.