Robert Darwin of Elston


Robert Darwin of Elston was an English lawyer and physician. He was the father of English physician Erasmus Darwin, and a great-grandfather of the famous English naturalist and geologist Charles Robert Darwin, best known for his contributions to evolution. It is with Robert Darwin of Elston that many biographies of his great-grandson begin.
In 1719 Darwin was instrumental in bringing the attention of the Royal Society to the first remains of a Jurassic reptile to be found: a fossilised plesiosaur, that would originally have been about 3 m long. The stone came from a quarry at Fulbeck and had been used, with the fossil on its underside, to reinforce the edge of a well in Elston. After the strange bones it contained had been discovered, it was displayed in the garden of the local parsonage by the rector, the Rev. John South, as a curiosity. Darwin communicated with William Stukeley who obtained the fossil for the Royal Society and described it in a paper in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, calling it "a Rarity, the like whereof has not been observ'd before in this Island". Stukeley speculated on the reasons for the fossil's presence in rock, mentioning the Biblical flood: he said that it was not human, but was probably a crocodile or porpoise. The specimen is today on display in the Natural History Museum as Plesiosaurus dolichodeirus, with the original registration number . It is the earliest discovered more or less complete fossil reptile skeleton in a museum collection.
Darwin married Elizabeth Hill on 1 January 1724 at Balderton, Nottinghamshire. They had four sons and three daughters: