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Louis Agassiz arrived in Britain during the autumn of 1834, having already received some very welcome financial support in the form of the Geological Society's Wollaston Fund for that year. The President of the Society, George Bellas Greenough, eager to help with such an important palaeontological and geological work, also issued a call to the Society’s Fellows to send examples of fossil fish to aid Agassiz and set a room aside for the Swiss naturalist and his artists to use as their London base.
Being based at the Society's apartments, which were then at Somerset House, the most obvious source from which to draw images for Agassiz's work was the Society's own Museum. This watercolour is of the front part of the fossil fish Eurynotus tenuiceps Agassiz (LDGSL/613/2/43/1), attributed to Theodor Hellmuth [c.1835]. The original specimen was described as being found in the oil shale, Sunderland, Massachusetts.
The Society no longer has its own Museum, the collection being broken up in 1911.
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