page_title: Mary Buckland
section_title: Career
hierarchical_section_title: Mary Buckland / Career
caption_attribution_description: English: Uncoloured Plate XL of Megalosaurus' jaw and teeth drawn by Mary Moreland, from William Buckland's "Notice on the Megalosaurus or great Fossil Lizard of Stonesfield". Transactions of the Geological Society of London, series 2, vol 1: 390 -396. A monumental year in palaeontology seeing (in this volume) both Buckland's first scientific description of a dinosaur, Megalosaurus, and Conybeare's first validation of long necked Plesiosaurs and scientific reconstructions of Plesiosaurs and Ichthyosaurs. Mary Moreland who drew the plates would later become Rev. Buckland's wife. These were some of the very few bones from which Richard Owen would base his reconstruction of Megalosaurus for Waterhouse Hawkins' Crystal Palace reconstructions in 1854. The jaw is still on display in the Oxford Museum - artist Mary Buckland, née Morland (1797-1857), British palaeontologist
context_page_description: Mary Morland Buckland was an English palaeontologist, marine biologist and scientific illustrator.
context_section_description: Mary Buckland started her career as a teenager producing illustrations and providing specimens for George Cuvier, widely regarded as the founder of paleontology, as well as for the British geologist William Conybeare. She made models of fossils, and labelled fossils for the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, studied marine zoophytes and repaired broken fossils inline with her husband's instructions.
  Mary Buckland assisted her husband greatly by writing as he dictated, editing, producing elaborate illustrations for his books, taking notes of his observations, and writing much of it herself. Her skills as an artist are on display in Mr. Buckland's largely illustrated work Reliquiae diluvianae, published in 1823, and in his Geology and Mineralogy in 1836. Her son noted that she was particularly "neat and clever in mending fossils" with specially developed cementing, and in assisting William Buckland's experiments to reproduce fossil tracks and many others. She assisted him when he was commissioned to contribute a volume to The Bridgewater Treatises. 
  Although Mary Buckland was in poor health after her husband's death, she continued her husband's work and branched out her own research. Examining micro forms of marine life through a microscope, with her daughter Carolin, and arranging a large collection of zoophytes and sponges, which she collected during her visits to the Channel islands of Guernsey and Sark with her husband. Much of her fossil reconstructions are held by the Oxford University Museum of Natural History.
caption: Anterior extremity of the right lower jaw of Megalosaurus drawn by Mary Buckland
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