Robert Plot was an English naturalist, antiquarian, and academic who became both the first Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum and the first Professor of Chemistry at the University of Oxford. His work represents an early intersection of natural history, archaeology, and experimental science in late‑17th‑century England.

Born in Borden and baptised there on 13 December 1640. Plot was educated at the Wye Free School before entering Magdalen Hall, Oxford, in 1658. He earned his BA (1661), MA (1664), and later a Batchelor of Civil Law (BCL) and Doctor of Civil Law (DCL), in1671. Robert served as dean and vice‑principal of Magdalen Hall before moving to University College in 1676.

Supported by senior Oxford patrons, Plot undertook extensive fieldwork across Oxfordshire, publishing The Natural History of Oxford-shire (1677). The book included the first known illustration of a dinosaur fossil, though Plot misidentified it as the bone of a war elephant or a giant human. He believed most fossils were mineral crystallisations rather than remains of living organisms.

His reputation led to election as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1677, where he later served as secretary and joint editor of the Philosophical Transactions.

In 1683, Plot was appointed Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum and simultaneously became Oxford’s first chemistry professor, working in the museum’s purpose‑built laboratory. His chemical interests included the search for a universal solvent and the medical applications of alchemy. He published De origine fontium (1684), attributing springs to subterranean channels fed by the sea.

Plot’s second major book, The Natural History of Staffordshire (1686), shifted toward archaeology and folklore. It documented the double sunset at Leek, the Abbots Bromley Horn Dance, and the first recorded description of the Polish swan, though some of his archaeological interpretations were inaccurate.

Plot held several heraldic and legal offices, including Mowbray Herald Extraordinary (1695) and registrar of the College of Heralds. He retired to Borden after 1690, working on unfinished natural histories of Middlesex and Kent. Suffering from severe urinary calculi, he died on 30 April 1696 and was buried in Borden Church.