Robert Darwin of Elston

Robert Darwin of Elston (12 August 1682 — 20 November 1754) was an English physician. He was the father of Erasmus Darwin, an English physician and an ancestor of the famous English naturalist and geologist, best known for his contributions to evolution, Charles Robert Darwin. It is with Robert Darwin of Elston that many biographies of his great-grandson begin.

In 1718 Darwin discovered the first remains of a Jurassic reptile to be found; a partly fossilised plesiosaur, about 3 m long. The stone plate came from a quarry at Fulbeck and had been used, with the fossil at its underside, to reinforce the slope of a watering-hole in Elston. After the strange bones it contained had been discovered, it was displayed in the local vicarage as the remains of a sinner drowned in the Great Flood. by William Stukeley described in a paper in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, calling the fossil "a rarity, the like whereof has not been observed before in this Island". Stukely affirmed its "diluvial" nature but understood it represented some sea creature, perhaps a crocodile or dolphin. The specimen is today preserved in the Natural History Museum, its inventory number being BMNH R.1330. It is the earliest discovered more or less complete fossil reptile skeleton in a museum collection. It can perhaps be referred to Plesiosaurus dolichodeirus.

Darwin married Elizabeth Hill (1702-1797) on 1 January 1724 at Balderton, Nottinghamshire. They had four sons and three daughters:

• Robert Waring Darwin of Elston (1724-1816)
• Elizabeth Darwin (15 September 1725 – 8 April 1800)
• William Alvey Darwin (1726-1783)
• Anne Darwin (12 November 1727 – 3 August 1813)
• Susannah Darwin (10 April 1729 – 29 September 1789)
• John Darwin (1730 – 1805), rector of Elston
• Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802), the poet, philosopher, physician, etc.