Problems in the Curation of Fossil Marine Reptiles

Abstract

The majority of the large fossil marine reptiles stored in British museums are ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs and crocodiles collected from the Liassic beds of England. Many of these specimens were recovered during the nineteenth century from manually operated quarries, especially those at Street in Somerset and at Barrow-on-Soar in Leicestershire. Others came from coastal exposures at Lyme Regis, or at Whitby where there were also large alum shale quarries (Howe e^ �l. 1981; Benton and Taylor 1984). Many of the more complete skeletons are now in the major collections held by the British Museum (Natural History), Oxford University Museum, and the Sedgwick Museum, Cambridge. The remainder, however, are scattered throughout the provincial museums of Britain and Ireland and often form the bulk of their fossil reptile collections. Virtually every specimen suffers from one of the three most prevalent problems affecting such fossils: poor data, poor standards of preparation and poor display techniques. In discussing these problems, those aspects peculiar to marine reptiles will be examined.