Mary Anning (1799-1847) was one of ten children born to Richard Anning and his wife Molly at Lyme Regis, a small coastal town in Dorset. Only two of the children, Mary, and her brother Joseph, survived to adulthood, and Mary herself came close to death when she was fifteen months old. Three women, one of them holding Mary Anning in her arms, were sheltering from a storm. When lightning struck the tree beneath which they were huddled it killed the women instantly. Mary was rushed home and revived in a bath of hot water. Until then a sickly child, she reputedly flourished thereafter.
But Mary’s family were poor, and the price of food was high. Richard Anning, a cabinet maker, supplemented his earnings collecting marine fossils from the beach with the assistance of his children. Nineteenth-century Lyme Regis was already a tourist resort, and like other families in the town, they sold their “curios” to visitors. Anning’s father died in 1810, leaving the family with debts. Joseph was apprenticed as an upholsterer, and Mary, sometimes still aided by her brother, continued to augment their income, gathering and marketing her finds from a table outside their home.
The Jurassic fossils came from the Blue Lias – alternating limestone and shale – cliffs to the west and east of Lyme. Winter storms rendered these cliffs unstable resulting in landslides which exposed the fossils, frequently depositing them on the foreshore. The work of collection was dangerous, for it had to take place before the tide washed the fossils away and meanwhile the risk of more rock falls remained high. In 1833 Mary Anning’s beloved dog, Tray, was killed in one such landslide which just missed Mary herself. There was added danger when the tide turned, for a high tide could reach the base of the cliffs.
Ammonites were the most common find, but rarer vertebrate fossils sold at a higher price. In 1811, when she was only ten years old, Mary discovered the first Ichthyosaurus, “fish lizard”, skeleton. Over several months she engaged in the painstaking and skilled work of digging out the 5.2 metre skeleton from the rock. In 1823 she found the first of two plesiosaurs, “sea dragons,” and in 1828 a pterosaur, a “flying dragon.”
Not only did Mary Anning have an unusual talent for discovering fossils and consummate skill in uncovering them, she also studied her specimens with a keen scientific eye. Though virtually uneducated, she had learned to read and write only at Sunday School, she consumed scientific literature, dissected fish to help her understanding of the anatomy of fossils, wrote about and illustrated her finds. When she noticed that chambers in belemnite fossils contained dried ink which resembled the ink sacs of modern squid and cuttle fish, she concluded that belemnites, like modern cephalopods, used ink for defence. Her exquisite drawings, and hypotheses advanced the new sciences of geology and palaeontology. In 1826 she opened her own shop in Lyme Regis, attracting fossil collectors and geologists from Europe and America, who came to buy specimens and draw on her knowledge.
When they were both teenagers and he was living in Lyme, the geologist Henry De La Beche had accompanied Mary Anning on fossil hunts. His famous watercolour Duria Antiquior portraying life in prehistoric Dorset was based on her findings. William Buckland, an Oxford lecturer in geology, also collected fossils with her, and it was to him that she wrote with her suggestion that what were then called bezoar stones were the fossilised faeces of ichthyosaurs. She had observed bezoar stones in the abdomens of ichthyosaurus skeletons. When she broke the stones open, she discovered fish bones and scales. Buckland seized on her suggestion renaming the bezoars as coprolites.
Roderick Impey Murchison, director of the newly formed Geology Society, and a founder of the Royal Geographical Society, corresponded with Anning. Palaeontologist Georges Cuvier credited her with providing evidence for the new Theory of Extinction. At this time even some reputable scientists believed that the earth was only a few thousand years old and discounted the possibility that any species could evolve or become extinct, or that new species could appear. Anning’s work showed that many species had disappeared, and that these fossils did not come from creatures still living in other parts of the world; the plesiosaur for example was quite unlike any other living creature. Extinction Theory predated Darwin’s Origin of the Species by forty-eight years.
But Mary Anning was working class and female so seldom received credit for her discoveries in the papers and lectures which drew on her expertise. Her scientific descriptions were published without acknowledgement. Nor, as a woman, was she eligible to join the Geological Society. When her specimens were displayed in museums, they bore the names of the collectors who had bought them, not that of the woman who had uncovered, dug out, cleaned, prepared, fixed, identified and drawn them. Nor was the recompense for those fossils great, and Mary Anning was rarely at a safe remove from poverty. Only in 1835 did she finally receive an annuity from the British Association for the Advancement of Science for her contributions to geology.
Mary Anning died of breast cancer in 1847, aged forty-seven. She was buried in St. Michael’s churchyard, Lyme Regis.
Today the Lyme Regis museum stands on the site of Mary Anning’s former home and fossil shop. The Natural History Museum in London showcases her Ichthyosaur, Plesiosaur and Pterosaur. The Oxford Museum of Natural History houses the partial skeleton of a young Ichthyosaur, and the Bristol museum is home to her Temnodontosaurus skull.
In 2018 eleven-year-old Evie Swire determined that Lyme Regis should, albeit belatedly, honour Mary Anning. With the assistance of her mother, Anya Pearson, she set up a crowdfunding campaign, with the inspired appellation Mary Anning Rocks, to raise money for a statue to celebrate the exceptional woman who had contributed so much to the fields of geology and palaeontology. Unveiled in May 2022, it is a beauty. Denise Dutton designed the bronze working with sketches provided by local schoolchildren. Mary carries her work tools and basket; Tray runs at her heels; her skirt is decorated with ammonites, one falls through a hole in her pocket, others lie at her feet. Yet this is no sentimental, whimsical representation: Mary Anning’s features are strong, every sinew is strained as she strides resolutely towards the sea at Black Ven where she made many of her finds. Mary Anning has a purpose. Mary Anning has a passion.
Her achievements may have been inadequately acknowledged in her lifetime, but there can be no doubt that today Mary Anning’s talents and scholarship are recognised, she is respected, and loved. For this statue must be the most popular in England. Mary’s basket is frequently filled with offerings of shells, fossils, flowers. No one seems able to pass beside her without some gesture of recognition and affection. Last time I was in Lyme, I stood on the slope which runs from the churchyard to the promenade, looking down at Mary and Tray. In the space of a few minutes children stopped to pat Tray; a group of young girls conducted a minute examination of the ammonites on Mary’s skirt; a young man paused unselfconsciously to kiss her hand; a couple encircled her with their arms; and numerous photographs were taken. And from the seashore came the faint ring of tapping hammers as Mary Anning’s followers sought their own ammonites. There can be no doubt: Mary Anning Rocks.
