Folio 45 from an album of 124 watercolours

Emanuel Mendes Da Costa’s pen and ink sketches of assorted fossils, ca. 1740, including an echinite or fossil sea urchin found near his family’s home in Mitcham, Surrey. Also portrayed are fossils cast in pyrite, and a specimen of Alcyonium tuberosum, an older taxonomic name for Suberites suberia (Montagu, 1818), an orange elongated globular sponge inhabited by a hermit crab.

Emanuel Mendes Da Costa (1717-1791) was a scientific author, a Fellow and the Librarian of the Royal Society.