Born: Lyme Regis, England, May 21, 1799
Died: Lyme Regis, England, March 9, 1847
Finder of Fossils
Mary Anning lived through a life of privation and hardship to become what one source called "the greatest fossilist the world ever knew."* Anning is credited with finding the first specimen ofIchthyosaurus acknowledged by the Geological Society in London. She also discovered the first nearly complete example of the Plesiosaurus; the first British Pterodactylus macronyx, a fossil flying reptile; the Squaloraja fossil fish, a transitional link between sharks and rays; and finally the Plesiosaurus macrocephalus.
Her history is incomplete and contradictory. Some accounts of her life have been fictionalized, and her childhood discoveries have been mythologized. She was a curiosity in her own time, bringing tourism to her home town of Lyme Regis. Only her personal qualities and her long experience brought her any recognition at all, since she was a woman, of a lower social class, and from a provincial area at a time when upper-class London men, gentlemanly scholars, received the bulk of the credit for geological discoveries.
Anning learned to collect fossils from her father, Richard, a cabinet maker by trade and a fossil collector by avocation. But he died at 44 in 1810, leaving his family destitute. They relied on charity to survive.
Fossil collecting was a dangerous business in the seaside town. Anning walked and waded under unstable cliffs at low tide, looking for specimens dislodged from the rocks. During her teenage years, the family built both a reputation and a business as fossil hunters. In 1817 they met Lieutenant-Colonel Thomas Birch, a well-to-do fossil collector who became a supporter of the family. He attributed major discoveries in the area to them, and he arranged to sell his personal collection of fossils for the family's benefit. Most of Anning's fossils were sold to institutions and private collectors, but museums tended to credit only people who donated the fossils to the institution. Therefore, it has been difficult for historians to trace many fossils that Mary Anning located; the best known are a small Ichthyosaurus discovered in 1821 and the first Plesiosaurus, unearthed in 1823.
Mary had some recognition for her intellectual mastery of the anatomy of her subjects, from Lady Harriet Silvester, who visited Anning in 1824 and recorded in her diary:
the extraordinary thing in this young woman is that she had made herself so thoroughly acquainted with the science that the moment she finds any bones she knows to what tribe they belong. . . . by reading and application she has arrived to that greater degree of knowledge as to be in the habit of writing and talking with professors and other clever men on the subject, and they all acknowledge that she understands more of the science than anyone else in this kingdom.**
Visitors to Lyme increased as Anning won the respect of contemporary scientists. In the last decade of her life she received an annuity from the British Association for the Advancement of Science (1838). The Geological Society of London collected a stipend for her and she was named the first Honorary Member of the new Dorset County Museum, one year before her death from breast cancer. Her obituary was published in the Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society--an organization that would not admit women until 1904.
Mary Anning
When Mary Anning was just a year old, a traveling circus passed through Lyme Regis where she lived, and everyone flocked outdoors to see it. A severe thunderstorm began, so the story goes, and the woman holding Anning was struck by lightning and killed, but little Mary Anning survived. According to her family, the sickly baby girl became much smarter and livelier as a result. Her intelligence served her family well. She made the most of Sunday school lessons where she likely learned to read and write, and she began collecting and selling fossils (in those days variously nicknamed vertiberries, snake stones, ladies' fingers and devil's toenails) while still a child.
From Rocks and Fossils by Arthur B. Busbey III, et al.Lyme Regis was an excellent spot to hunt fossils. Roughly 200 million years ago, the area lay near the equator, at the bottom of a tropical sea. Marine animals were often quickly buried in sea-floor mud and preserved. In modern times, Lyme Regis fills a thin strip of land bordered by cliffs that regularly surrender fossils. Today, amateurs are allowed to collect fossils from loose rocks along the beach. Amateurs are also allowed to dig along the cliffs, although only with a permit.
Mary Anning likely acquired her love of fossil collecting primarily from her father, Richard. He took increasing time away from his carpentry business to hunt for fossils along the rockfall-prone slippery shore, and he often took Mary and her brother Joseph with him. Richard died when Mary was just 11. Without her father, Mary resumed combing the beach for fossils. In a story that sounds as apocryphal as the lightning strike, on her first fossil outing by herself, Anning encountered a tourist who paid half a crown for a pretty ammonite she had just found. Some accounts also contend that Mary's early success came when her own mother was so grief-stricken that she was almost negligent, but Mrs. Anning (also named Mary, and nicknamed Molly) actually hunted for and sold fossils in her own right, helping to keep the family afloat.
Like her mother, the younger Mary Anning was a commercial collector, but at that time, the commercial market for fossils was not what it is today. (No one would fork over several million dollars for a T. rex skeleton then.) She occasionally sold fossils for a tidy profit — perhaps 100 or 200 pounds, which might translate into $200,000 to $400,000 today. Yet she often fell on hard times, sometimes because she couldn't find fossils, and sometimes because the public took no interest in what she did find. Gentlemen geologists occasionally came to her aid, some of them securing a small pension for her late in her life. Geologist and amateur artist Henry De la Beche went so far as to paint "a more ancient Dorset," a cheerful depiction of marine life, representing many of the fossils Anning collected, to rouse public interest in her fossils. Occasional rumors linked De la Beche and Anning romantically, but these might have stemmed from the simple fact that De la Beche, unlike some of his contemporaries and even close friends, was willing to acknowledge Anning's role in science. Anning's most generous acquaintance may have been Lt. Col. Thomas James Birch (later Bosvile) who, when the Annings were desperately selling furniture to make rent, auctioned off the fossils he had previously bought from them and gave the Annings the auction proceeds. He wrote a friend about his regret at parting with his fossil collection but knew the money would be "well applied."
Although wealthy fossil collectors often had fossils named after them, no British fossil was named for Anning until 1878: a coral named Tricycloseris anningi. In 1995, Hugh Torrens and Michael Taylor reported that Anning was yet to be commemorated in the name of a British fossil reptile.
Anning is often credited with finding the world's first ichthyosaur, but other specimens had already been found. Moreover, it was actually her brother who found it, though she reputedly carried out the excavation herself at the tender age of 12. Anning's ichthyosaur was the first to attract the attention of London's gentlemen geologists. Henry Hoste Henley learned about her find from local reports, bought it for a handsome sum, and gave it to another gentleman geologist for his own natural history museum. Within a few years, the British Museum bought it.
The fossil find became the basis for six papers — all of them stuffy and erroneous — by Everard Home. More skilled anatomists started calling the fossil Ichthyosaurus around 1820. About that time, Anning found the world's first nearly complete plesiosaur, described by Conybeare and De la Beche. With its little skull on the end of a long neck, the plesiosaur was considerably weirder than the ichthyosaur, which at least looked crocodilian.
Anning's plesiosaur at the Natural History Museum, London. Photo by Michon Scott.
Tribute to Anning at the Sedgwick Museum, Cambridge. Photo by Michon Scott.In 1834, the deeply eccentric fossil collector Thomas Hawkins sold the British Museum a collection of fossil marine reptiles. The biggest and best beast of his collection was his "great sea dragon" (Temnodontosaurus platyodon). But Hawkins didn't collect the fossil himself; it was collected by Anning. When the Natural History Museum of London broke off from the British Museum, the Hawkins fossil collection moved to its new home in Kensington. The year after Hawkins sold his collection to the British Museum, Anning sold another ichthyosaur fossil to Adam Sedgwick, then a professor at Cambridge with ambitions of establishing a big museum at the university. Anning's ichthyosaur in Cambridge shares a display case with another ichthyosaur found by Thomas Hawkins. And like the Natural History Museum in London, the Sedgwick Museum displays Anning's portrait next to plesiosaur fossils.
Beyond ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs, Anning also found the first recognized pterosaur fossil in England (Mantell found pterosaur remains before Anning, but attributed them to a bird). Anning also found fossil cuttlefish that, amazingly, retained their original sepia (ink ejected to thwart predators). Elizabeth Philpot, a wealthy collector and friend of Anning's, used the sepia in illustrations, and Buckland recounted how a "celebrated painter" described the fossil ink as "of excellent quality."
Later accounts of Anning's ichthyosaur excavation focused on her young age and depictions of her and a winsome child in a pinafore. Perhaps her contemporaries found the thought of a grown woman "in trade" unappealing. Late in her life, some who met her described her as strong and energetic, but other accounts included terms such as thin, shrewd, and prone to "violent likes and dislikes."
United Kingdom Royal Mail Mint Stamps, issued October 10, 2013As Anning matured and began to appreciate her own contributions to science, she grew resentful of the scientists who failed to acknowledge her work. She was rumored to detest William Buckland's interpretations of fossils, but no evidence can be found in her correspondence to him, which was usually congenial. Like De la Beche, Gideon Mantell was inclined to recognize her contributions (though he once described her as a "prim, pedantic vinegar looking female"); William Conybeare was less so. Roderick Impey Murchison must have been kinder to Anning than most as she lionized him in a whimsical poem that poked a little fun at Adam Sedgwick and William Buckland. Anning got off to a bad start with Georges Cuvier, who initially thought the plesiosaur she found was a composite of different animals. He was finally reassured of its authenticity by Buckland and Conybeare, and eventually acquired one of her plesiosaurs. Fossils collected by Anning are still on display in the natural history museum in Paris.
Anning had a short and often difficult life. The family had always been poor, and when her father died, he left behind debts his survivors were hard-pressed to pay. Out of at least nine children, Anning and her brother were the only ones to survive to adulthood; she was actually named after a sister who died shortly before the younger Mary was born. Her father was a Dissenter (of another faith than Anglican), which, in early 19th-century England, could be a major impediment to worldly success. Anning eventually converted to the Church of England — a practical decision since many of her customers were Anglican, but the move was probably motivated by genuine faith, too. (Her brother also converted.) After her death, a stained glass window was unveiled in the Lyme Regis church of Saint Michael's commemorating her devotion to the local poor.
Anning had the good fortune to live where fossils eroded out of the shoreline, and she had the intelligence to recognize their significance. Still, the work was dangerous; rock falls could happen at any time. She narrowly escaped a landslide that killed her dog, and barely missed being crushed by a runaway cart. An acquaintance remarked that Anning read the Bible more often after one such brush with death. In the end, she died in her 40s of breast cancer. Her death, some locals noted, actually precipitated a drop in visitors to Lyme Regis. For all the difficulties she endured, Anning became a bit of a celebrity. By the time she died, she had become so well known that Charles Dickens's journal All the Year Round reported "the carpenter's daughter has won a name for herself, and deserved to win it."
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