My mineral and fossil collection at Stowe is almost unequalled. I purchased the mineral collection of Abbé Haüy, the celebrated founder of crystallography, after his death. The collection cost me £4,000, around £3 million today! The ten thousand specimen collection is housed in my Museum set in the flower garden at Stowe, along with my natural history, fossil and archaeological specimens.

My prize specimen is not, however, within the Haüy collection. It is the complete skeleton of a Plesiosaurus which I purchased from fossil collector, dealer and palaeontologist Mary Anning for 100 guineas (£105) in 1823. There is great excitement about this huge specimen, one of the largest discovered. It measures about 10 feet long (3 meters).

The Plesiosaurus has created a great deal of scientific interest, and I have allowed it to be examined by my friend and correspondent Dr William Buckland. A plaster cast of the specimen has been made by Sir Frances Chantrey, and a lithograph from this has appeared in the Transactions of the Geological Society of London.

The Rev William Daniel Conybeare used this fossil to confirm and revise his analysis of plesiosaur anatomy at a meeting of the Geological Society in 1824. Many commentators have since noted that he failed to mention Mary Anning by name, and accuse the men of stealing credit due to her. Conybeare's presentation was made at the same meeting as that at which Buckland described the dinosaur Megalosaurus. The whole matter has been sensational and Mary Anning rightly earned the epithet “the greatest fossilist the world ever knew”.

The Plesiosaurus was sold to the British Museum in 1848 for the frankly modest sum of 8 guineas (£8 8s). The Haüy collection went under the hammer for a scarcely better sum of 310 guineas (£325 10s) to M Dufrénoy, who purchased it for the Jardin des Plantes, at Paris.

Buckingham and Chandos