Robert Plot

Robert Plot (1640 to 1696) was an English naturalist and antiquarian, the first professor of chemistry at the University of Oxford and the first keeper of the Ashmolean Museum. Born at Borden in Kent and baptised on 13 December 1640, he was educated at Wye Free School and entered Magdalen Hall, Oxford, in 1658, taking his BA in 1661 and MA in 1664 and later his BCL and DCL in 1671. In 1677 he published The Natural History of Oxford-shire, in which he described rocks, minerals and fossils and illustrated what is now seen as the femur of a Megalosaurus, the first known illustration of a dinosaur bone, though he believed most fossils were crystallisations of mineral salts. Its reception earned him election to the Royal Society on 6 December 1677, where he served as secretary and joint editor of the Philosophical Transactions from 1682 to 1684. He became the first keeper of the Ashmolean Museum in 1683 and the first professor of chemistry in its new laboratory, started Oxford's Philosophical Society there, and searched for a universal solvent obtainable from wine spirits.