50 



The Rev. WILLIAM DANIEL CONYBEARE, Dean of Llandaff, 

 was born in London, 7th June, 1787, and died 12th August, 1857> 

 aged 71. The family name has been for some time honourably 

 connected with the Church of England. His father was Rector of 

 St. Botolph, Bishopsgate. 



Following at a short interval, in Oxford, the academical progress 

 of his brother John Josias Conybeare, and his friend William Buck- 

 land, he speedily associated himself in their mineralogical and 

 geological studies, contributed actively to the growth of the Oxford 

 Museum, and assisted in the early labours of the Geological Society. 

 He explored personally much of the country round Oxford, and 

 examined the north of Ireland, the vicinity of Bath and Bristol, and 

 the coasts of Dorset, Devon, and South Wales. 



Organic remains attracted his attention in the early part of his 

 career. In 1814 he presented to the Geological Society remarks on 

 some singular impressions occurring in flint* ; in 1821, he was 

 associated with De la Beche in the discovery of a new fossil animal, 

 forming a link between the Ichthyosaurus and the Crocodile f ; and 

 in 1824, completed this investigation on the almost perfect skeleton 

 of the Plesiosaurus^. 



In these papers Conybeare opened a new and very fertile field of 

 research, and cultivated it with success ; manifesting so much know- 

 ledge of anatomy and the skeleton of reptiles, as to win from the 

 great author of the ' Ossemens Fossiles' the free adoption of his con- 

 clusions, novel and startling as they appeared. Whoever will now 

 read the admirable descriptions by Owen of this extinct reptile, or 

 strive for himself to recompose from the ordinary fragments in 

 museums its strange figure, will revere the early and successful 

 labours of Conybeare, and comprehend in how high a degree they 

 have helped forward the Palaeontology of Britain. 



From time to time the interest of the restorer of Plesiosaurus 

 dolichodeirus was revived by the discovery of other species of the 

 genus, so far as to give them a name, but he never again tasked his 

 powerful mind on a systematic review of the subject : satisfied, 

 perhaps, with one long and steady gaze on these wonders of the 

 earlier world, he resigned to other travellers the road which he had 



* Geol. Trans. 1st Ser. ii. 328. f Geol. Trans. 1st Ser. v. 559. 



I Geol. Trans. 2nd Ser. i. 381. 



