Mary Buckland, View of the Axmouth landslip
Mary Buckland,
‘View of the Axmouth landslip from Dowlands, looking westward upon the undercliff and new beach raised from the bottom of the sea on the 25th Dec 1839’.
Donated by Martin Rudwick
In 1825 William Buckland married the naturalist and scientific illustrator Mary Morland (1797-1857). She produced the illustrations for Buckland’s Reliquiæ diluvianæand sent Georges Cuvier drawings of the Megalosaurus, a creature described and named by William Buckland and later termed a fossil “dinosaur” (a term coined by Richard Owen in 1842). Mary Buckland also mended fossils with specially developed cement and made fossil models. Working with William Conybeare and William Dawson, a local civil engineer, the Bucklands produced a series of plans, sections and artistic views recording landslips on the coast of East Devon, between Axmouth and Lyme Regis, in December 1839 and February 1840.