Mary Buckland

Mary Buckland (née Morland; 20 November 1797 – 30 November 1857) was an English palaeontologist, marine biologist and scientific illustrator.

Early life and family

Mary Morland was born in 1797, the eldest child of Benjamin Morland (1768–1833), a successful solicitor with a practice in Abingdon-on-Thames, and his wife Harriet (née Baster). In 1799 Harriet died, following the birth and early death of the couple's second child, and in 1802 Benjamin married Elizabeth Thornhill. By 1812, when Benjamin bought Sheepstead House at Marcham near Abingdon, Mary had many half-brothers and sisters. Although at some stage she attended a boarding school in Southampton, Mary also spent much time during her childhood at the home of Sir Christopher and Lady Pegge in Oxford, where Pegge, the Regius Professor of Anatomy at the University, encouraged her scientific interests.

In the midst of her teenage years she was intrigued by the studies conducted by Georges Cuvier and provided him with specimens and illustrations.

Marriage

According to Caroline Fox, Buckland met her husband the Reverend William Buckland in the following way:

On 31st December 1825 They had nine children, including Frank Buckland and author Elizabeth Oke Buckland Gordon. 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. Buckland supported her husband's pursuits, while balancing her time to help educate, and teach her children. She also spent her time promoting education within the villages. Shortly after, Mary retired to St Leonards-on-Sea in Sussex and continued to show an appreciation of her husband's studies. 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 Caroline, 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.