Credit: © The Royal Society
    Image number: RS.6160
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    A crocodile skeleton in the Royal Society’s Repository

    Date
    1681
    Object type
    Image reference
    Library reference
    18848
    Material
    Technique
    Dimensions
    height (print): 170mm
    width (print): 540mm
    Subject
    Content object
    nature
       > animal
    Description
    Studies of a ‘Skeleton of a Crocodile or the Leviathan' (‘Given by Sir Robert Southwell; to whom it was sent from the East-Indies’); ‘An Elephant's Tusk’; a ‘Rattle Snak's Tail’ (the rattle of a rattlesnake); and ‘The Wesan’ (windpipe) of a crocodile.

    Table 4 from the book Musaeum Regalis Societatis; or, A catalogue and description of the natural and artificial rarities belonging to the Royal Society, and preserved at Gresham Colledge, by Nehemiah Grew (second printing: London, 1686).

    The Royal Society’s museum collection, or Repository, was established in the 1660s. It was intended to be “a General Collection of all the Effects of Arts, and the Common, or Monstrous Works of Nature”, for use by the Fellows in their attempts to understand and classify the natural world. The first catalogue of the collection was produced by Nehemiah Grew in 1681; it was reissued in 1686 and 1694.
    Related fellows
    Robert Southwell (1635 - 1702, British) , Diplomat
    Associated place
    <The World>
       > Europe
          > United Kingdom
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