13. A Purpose-built Museum

Saull’s wine profits had sent him on a spending spree. His mentor, Sir Richard Phillips, visiting the museum in 1835, reckoned it held “ten thousand” fossils. So many that it was bursting, and Saull now rebuilt the museum as a brick-based, two-story exhibition. By the later thirties the press rated it the largest private geological collection in London, possibly the country. Giant Iguanodon saurians, collected in the Isle of Wight, were the new attraction. It was here that the Hunterian Professor at the Royal College of Surgeons, the grave Anglican Richard Owen, found an Iguanodon sacrum (fused pelvic vertebrae) that would allow him to separate off these reptiles as ‘dinosaurs’. The ideological importance of the newly-reshaped dinosaurs for the anti-evolutionist Owen is discussed. The Gideon Mantell—Richard Owen tussle over Saull’s sacrum further brought the museum into public view.