Mary Buckland

Mary Buckland, née Morland
File:Mary Morland Buckland, from an original photograph.jpg
Born	1797 Abingdon, England
Died	1857
Nationality	English
Fields	Paleontology
Spouse	William Buckland

Mary Buckland, née Morland (born Abingdon 1797, died 1857), was a British palaeontologist, marine biologist and scientific illustrator.

Life

Buckland family silhouette

She was born in 1797 in Sheepstead House, Abingdon, to Benjamin Morland, a solicitor. Her mother died when she was a baby, and her father remarried, producing a large family of half-brothers and sisters. She spent much of her childhood in Oxford, living with a physician, Sir Christopher Pegge, and his wife.

The following romantic anecdote (recorded by Miss Caroline Fox in her journal for 8 October 1839) is told about how Mary met her future husband William Buckland:

Both were travelling in Dorsetshire and each were reading a new and weighty tome by the French naturalist Georges Cuvier. "They got into conversation, the drift of which was so peculiar that Dr. Buckland exclaimed, "You must be Miss Morland, to whom I am abut to deliver a letter of introduction.' He was right, and she soon became Mrs Buckland. She is an admirable fossil geologist, and makes midels in leather of some of the rare discoveries".

In 1825 Mary Morland married William Buckland, who later became Dean of Westminster. Their honeymoon was a geological tour lasting a year, including visits to famous geologists and geological locations across Europe. They had nine children, including Frank Buckland. The children were exposed to their parents collections of fossils from an early age and at the age of 4 Frank could successfully identify the vertebrae of an ichthyosaurus.

File:Mary Buckland05.jpg

Anterior extremity of the right lower jaw of Megalosaurus drawn by Mary Buckland

Mary was an accomplished illustrator, producing illustrations for Georges Cuvier, a French palaeontologist, and for a work by William Conybeare, a British geologist. She also made models of fossils, and labelled fossils for an Oxford museum. She studied marine zoophytes using microscopes. She repaired broken fossils according to her husband's instructions.

She assisted her husband by writing as he dictated, producing illustrations for his books, and taking notes of his observations. She assisted him when he was commissioned to contribute a volume to The Bridgewater Treatises. His contribution in 1836 was a mixture of geological and palaeontological science and philosophical reflections. It is difficult to assess Mary Buckland's contributions to science, because so much of her work was involved with that of her husband.

We know a lot about William Buckland from the biography written by his and Mary's daughter Elizabeth.

Mary Buckland amassed a vast collection of fossils and other specimens. She also taught in a village school in Islip, near the family's country home.