On December 9, 1833, the English fossil collector Elizabeth Philpot sent a letter to naturalist William Buckland. In addition to requesting back some vertebrae of a marine reptile Buckland had ...

The remarkable creatures highlighted in the title of Tracy Chevalier’s new novel are two early-19th-century English fossil hunters, Mary Anning and Elizabeth Philpot. Equally, the eponymous ...

We were very poor, so we sold what we found to people on the beach. One customer, Elizabeth Philpot, knew so much more about my curiosities than me, so she gave me a book to help me study them.

Elizabeth Philpot is a scholarly lady of the gentrified classes; Mary Anning a local girl of humble origins, famous for having been struck by lightning as a babe in arms. Their common pursuit ...