This dino-mite lady unearthed some of history’s most important dinosaurs, only to have men steal them
Not until after her death was Mary Anning credited publicly for her crucial role in establishing paleontology
“She sells sea-shells on the sea-shore,” goes the 1908 tongue twister by Terry Sullivan. “She,” a woman by the name of Mary Anning, did sell by the seashore at Lyme Regis, on the southwest coast of England, more than half a century before Sullivan wrote the rhyme, but her wares weren’t sea shells — they were fossils, millions of years old.
Mary Anning had no formal education, but the discoveries she unearthed while combing the cliffs of what is now called England’s Jurassic Coast helped early-19th-century geologists and paleontologists determine the age of the earth, the existence of dinosaurs, and the concept of extinction. While she was well respected by some of the era’s most recognized scholars, Anning’s gender meant she was barred from participating in the organizations at the forefront of geological thought — the Royal Society and the Geological Society — and her male colleagues took credit for her work. Not until after her death was Anning credited publicly for her crucial role in establishing the field of paleontology.
Mary Anning was born a sickly baby to an impoverished family in 1799. Weak, eating little, and coughing constantly, little Mary “stubbornly clung to life,” writes Shelley Emling in her biography of Anning, The Fossil Hunter. When she was 15 months old, a nurse and family friend took the baby to a horseback-riding show to get her some fresh air. Suddenly an electrical storm turned the bucolic day into a harrowing one. A flash of lightning struck the tree under which Mary sat, instantly killing the nurse and two other women, bursting open their shoes like firecrackers and singeing their hair and clothing. When pried from the arms of the nurse, Anning, miraculously, was still faintly breathing.
Strangely, the brush with death appeared to jolt her into health. While Mary had been a weak, sickly baby, locals said that the lightning strike transformed her “into a lively, healthy and exceedingly curious young girl,” writes Emling. By the age of five or six, Mary was accompanying her father, Richard, a carpenter, on his beachcombing forays, where he sought fossils to sell to passing tourists to supplement the family’s income. It wasn’t considered proper for a young girl to be out on such dirty, windswept adventures, but Mary stubbornly refused to leave her father’s side.
After Richard died following a fall from a cliff in 1810, it was Anning’s obstinacy that saved the family from extreme poverty. Following in the footsteps of her father, Mary, then 11 years old, and her brother Joseph, who was 14, continued the hunt for fossils to sell to tourists.
For centuries, local residents had considered the objects eroding from the shores of Lyme Regis to be curiosities. With Charles Darwin’s groundbreaking On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection still on the distant horizon, people looked for explanations for the unusual fossils in their Christian faith. Some thought that fossils were gifts from God that had bubbled up from the earth’s center to beautify the world. Others believed they were remains from the great flood described in the book of Genesis. Whatever they were, tourists bought them in droves in front of the village’s Three Cups Inn.
In 1811, when Mary was just 12 years old, her brother found a skull four feet long, with at least 200 teeth. Now that he was the household’s primary breadwinner, Joseph had less and less time for fossil hunting, so it was Mary who returned to the spot to look for the rest of the creature’s skeleton. She searched for a year but came up with nothing she could associate with the massive head. Finally, a heavy storm eroded a portion of the cliffs, exposing new skeletal material. With her hammer, Mary slowly began to expose a 17-foot-long intact skeleton with 60 vertebrae and dolphin-like flippers. She sold the specimen for the equivalent of $2,300 today. It was a handsome sum for a poor family, but the find was actually worth far more to posterity. It was the first complete skeleton of an ichthyosaur ever found.
The ichthyosaur was a large carnivorous reptile that swam the earth’s oceans around 200 million years ago, during the Mesozoic Era’s “Age of Reptiles.” Mary Anning would continue to unearth them throughout her life, attracting the attention of some of England’s most notable “fathers” of geology, including the Reverend William Buckland and William Daniel Conybeare. While still in her teens, bucking the etiquette governing male-female relationships at the time, Mary played guide to these scholars on fossil-hunting expeditions among the beachside cliffs of her village.
Mary’s reputation was also growing among local residents, so when she discovered something unusual in December 1823, it wasn’t difficult to get some villagers to assist her in exposing the creature. The nine-foot-long, six-foot-wide skeleton with a puny head less than five inches long, and delicate paddles, came to be known as Plesiosaurus, a species Conybeare had theorized on a previous visit to Lyme Regis. After some debate over the specimen’s authenticity, it was shipped to the Geological Society of London in February 1824 to be presented to the field’s foremost scholars. Mary Anning was not invited.
By her late twenties, Anning was still unmarried, but professionally she was at the top of her game. By 1826 Mary had saved enough money from her fossil hunting to purchase a small cottage. In the front room, she installed a picture window and opened a shop, Anning’s Fossil Depot, to sell her finds. Just two years later, Mary made one of her most important discoveries, a 200-million-year-old winged, flying creature called a pterosaur.
Anning’s pterosaur (better known as a pterodactyl), wasn’t the first to be found — that specimen was located in northern Bavaria in 1784 — but it was the first discovered in England and made quite a splash when it was presented at the Geological Society by William Buckland in February 1829. Though he noted that Mary Anning had first found the creature, Buckland took credit for its identification. Mary, who was still not permitted to enter the hallowed halls of the Geological Society, had no choice but to accept Buckland’s claim.
Buckland wasn’t the first, nor would he be the last, to claim one of Mary’s discoveries. Only one of the geologists Anning hosted over her 30-plus years of work, Louis Agassiz, a Swiss naturalist, would give her proper credit for her pioneering work. In the 1840s, Agassiz named two fossil fish species after Anning — Acrodus anningia and Belenostomus anningiae. Even without the acknowledgment she deserved, Mary Anning was among only a handful of Englishwomen outside the nobility in the early 19th century whose name was recognized far and wide.
When Anning died after a hopeless and painful battle with breast cancer in 1847, Charles Dickens, among others, would remember the trailblazing paleontologist in print. In an article for his weekly literary magazine, All the Year Round, Dickens wrote that “the carpenter’s daughter has won a name for herself and has deserved to win it.”
A year after her death, Mary Anning’s contributions to the field were finally recognized at the Geological Society she had been excluded from during her life. In his eulogy to the year’s deceased scholars, President Henry De la Beche remembered his friend, whom he had first met in 1812 when she was just 12:
I cannot close this notice of our losses by death without advertising to that of one, who though not placed among even the easier classes of society, but one who had to earn her daily bread by her labor, yet contributed by her talents and untiring researches in no small degree to our knowledge of the great Enalio-Saurins, and other forms of organic life entombed in the vicinity of Lyme Regis … there are those among us in this room who know well how to appreciate the skill she employed … in developing the remains of the many fine skeletons of Ichthyosauri and Plesiosauri, which without her care would never have been presented.
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