The photograph of artist Mark Dion included in his latest exhibition, Microcosmographia, is strikingly similar to one of the American naturalist William Beebe taken in 1917. This is no accident: Dion's adoption of the attitudes and methods of such early naturalists is very deliberate. Through Microcosmographia, Dion highlights problems of accuracy, past and present, in natural history and taxonomy.

The exhibition's central piece, Ichthyosaur, pictured here, references the confusion of palaeontological classification in the early nineteenth century. Variously misinterpreted by fossil collectors and palaeontologists as prehistoric fish, predecessors of modern crocodiles, or relatives of the duck-billed platypus, the genus Ichthyosaur was only officially designated as such by William Daniel Conybeare in 1822.

Credit: SOUTH LONDON GALLERY

The belly of Dion's life-size resin replica of a beached ichthyosaur is split open and overflows with the paraphernalia of early naturalists, ranging from old reference manuals to glass beakers. The work seems to suggest that the ichthyosaur is a creature quite literally made up of the past; that its inner workings are defined by the humans who discovered it and eventually classified it. The concept resonates with present-day taxonomy, which is struggling to systematize 250 years of natural history of varying scientific quality: sifting out errors, identifying missed connections, and establishing a comprehensive informatics for the field.

Confusions and corrections, such as those surrounding the ichthyosaur, inspire Dion's work. The diverse collection of sculptures, drawings and photographs in this exhibition, and their juxtapositions and groupings, focus on long-dead scientists and their influences on scientific understanding today. But the collection also raises important questions about the fallibility of science. Dion seems to want to point out the mistakes of the past in order to warn us about mistakes we might be making now, and might make in the future.

Microcosmographia, organized by the South London Gallery, can be seen at The Harris Museum and Art Gallery in Preston, UK, until 12 March 2006.