The ichthyosaur skull was found in late 1810 or early 1811, just after the death of Richard Anning. Joseph did find the skull and was credited with the entire find when it went on display, but Mary completed its excavation and reassembly in 1811 to 1812. Not much is known about the excavation process except that men were paid to get it down from the cliff, but I think it’s entirely feasible that she dared to do much of the work herself... though maybe not by abseiling!
Her next big find was in 1823: the complete skeleton of a plesiosaur. This was followed up in 1828 by the ‘flying dragon’, or pterosaur, and a squaloraja fish in 1829. Over her forty-year ‘career’, Mary found an absolute myriad of creatures, but these are the most important. None of them, however, bear her name. They were all named after the men who bought them or who announced them – with Mary’s permission – to the world. Her gender and low status meant it was unthinkable that she should have anything named after her. Elizabeth Philpot had a fossil fish named after her, but she was ‘gentry’. All the men who had dealings with Mary have specimens named after them. Imagine how disheartening that must have been!
Mary did meet Henry De la Beche when she was a child, but I have, of course, imagined their time together (Beche is pronounced ‘Beach’ – Henry’s father added the ‘De la’ so that it sounded a bit grander!). It is clear that their friendship ran deep and their combination of his knowledge and her instincts was very successful. He always gave her full credit for her contribution and came to her financial rescue more than once, auctioning off drawings of finds and selling off prints to raise money for her.
Henry did not, as far as I know, give her the puppy, but Mary did come to own and train one and called him Tray (a very strange name for a dog!). Tray would sit and guard a find while she got extra equipment or help. Very sadly, he was killed in a landslip which missed Mary by mere feet. It must have broken her heart to see her loyal friend killed doing her service.
Elizabeth Philpot, after whom the Lyme Regis Museum was originally named, was also a good friend and companion to Mary. I have concentrated on her rather than her sisters, Louise and Margaret (who also collected fossils and shells), because there is better evidence through letters etc of her relationship with Mary. The accounts of their conversations are, of course, fiction, as are the meetings with Mr De Luc.
The story of the drowned woman is true. Mary was sixteen years old when this happened. How can it not have had a profound effect on her? It is no wonder that her tender behaviour struck people like Anna Maria Pinney, who became friendly with Mary in her later years, as Mary was generally known for her no-nonsense manner and plain-speaking; not that she was unkind, but she was definitely not one for sentimentality. Anna seems to have thought it was evidence of a romantic streak in Mary’s nature. Maybe she felt she was one of the few to see Mary’s softer side and felt rather proud of that. But she was also not blind to the way Mary was exploited by some, writing: ‘She says the world has used her ill... these men of learning have sucked her brains, and made a great deal of publishing works, of which she furnished the contents, while she derived none of the advantages.’
In 1826, Mary opened her shop, Anning’s Fossil Depot, and was sought out by all the leading geologists and palaeontologists. In 1844, King Frederick Augustus of Saxony visited and bought an ichthyosaur skeleton for his extensive collection. The King’s aide, Carl Gustav Carus, wrote in his journal: ‘We had alighted from the carriage and were proceeding on foot, when we fell in with a shop in which the most remarkable petrifications and fossil remains – the head of an ichthyosaurus, beautiful ammonites, etc – were exhibited in the window. We entered and found the small shop and adjoining chamber completely filled with fossil productions of the coast... I found in the shop a large slab of blackish clay, in which a perfect ichthyosaurus of at least six feet was embedded. This specimen would have been a great acquisition for many of the cabinets of natural history on the Continent, and I consider the price demanded, £15 sterling, as very moderate.’
William Buckland, the first ever Professor of Geology at Oxford University, almost certainly visited to see her first big find, the ichthyosaur, but it did not get its scientific name until some years later. I had Buckland name it then and there for the sake of the story. Mary became great friends with him and his family. His wife, Mary Morland Buckland, was herself a geologist and a scientific illustrator. They were a pretty lively lot and Mary seems to have got a lot out of the friendship, writing to them frequently and, on one occasion, sending them ‘a mouthful of kisses’.
I have not introduced another important figure in Mary’s story, Lieutenant-Colonel Thomas James Birch, because he did not come into Mary’s life until after the episodes at the end of this book. He bailed the Anning family out when a lean year for finds had left them penniless. He sold off a collection of fossils that he had originally bought from Mary and gave the Annings most or all of the proceeds of about £400, which would be equivalent to £11,500 in today’s money. He wrote of the family as being the people who ‘in truth found almost all of the fine things that have been submitted to scientific investigation.’
Despite that tribute and the high regard of many other scientists in the emerging field of geology, Mary was never admitted to the Geological Society (in fact, women were only admitted in 1904). However, when she became ill with the breast cancer which would take her life aged forty-seven, members of the Society raised money to help with her living costs. She died on 9 March 1847 and was buried in the graveyard of St Michael the Archangel in Lyme Regis. You can go and see her grave and the stained-glass window installed in her memory in 1850 and partly paid for by the Geological Society. Do visit the museum in Lyme Regis too. It has got a really good section on its world-famous pioneering palaeontologist. Look out for her name against fossils in museums all over the UK, especially the Natural History Museum in London.
Henry De la Beche was loyal to the very end, and in an unprecedented tribute to a non-member (and a woman at that!), read out a eulogy at a meeting of the Society.
It began: ‘I cannot close this notice of our losses by death without adverting 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 labour, yet contributed by her talents and untiring researches in no small degree to our knowledge of the great Enalio-Saurans, and other forms of organic life entombed in the vicinity of Lyme Regis...’
Charles Dickens wrote, some eighteen years later, of another more mercenary reaction to her death in an article entitled: ‘Mary Anning – the Fossil Finder’: ‘Dr. Buckland and Professor Owen and others knew her worth, and valued her accordingly; but she met with little sympathy in her own town, and the highest tribute which that magniloquent guide-book, The Beauties of Lyme Regis, can offer her, is to assure us that “her death was, in a pecuniary point, a great loss to the place, as her presence attracted a large number of distinguished visitors”. Quick returns are the thing at Lyme. We need not wonder that Miss Anning was chiefly valued as bait for tourists.’
On the one hand, Mary’s story is profoundly sad – or so it seems to me – but on another it is an absolute triumph of one woman’s singlemindedness and determination against all the odds. I must confess myself little interested in fossils, but there is something about this lone figure, braving the elements and the treachery of the landscape to uncover the treasures we can now see displayed in museums across the world. Even more gutsy and inspirational is the fact that she did what nobody would have expected from a ‘mere’ woman and one of a lowly class at that.
She was at the cutting edge of earth sciences at a time when most people took the Biblical description of creation literally. The theories explored in the book John Playfair’s Illustrations of the Huttonian Theory of the Earth (which I imagined her being given) would have been regarded as incendiary stuff, revealing the Earth to be in a constant cycle of change and millions of years older than the six thousand years most believed the
Earth to be. Mary’s fossil finds provided evidence for views which challenged these long-held beliefs and sent huge ripples through society and organised religion. The concept of extinction – or, worse, of God making mistakes – was absolutely unthinkable to a Christian and anyone who spoke or wrote about such things was regarded at best as a troublemaker and at worst as a heretic.
It is hard for us to really get our heads round just how extraordinary Mary Anning was as an individual, but when you reflect that, even now, nearly 200 years on, from a numerical perspective men continue to dominate the scientific community, her status becomes even more remarkable. And she was pretty much self-taught – no university for her!
Now that I have come to the end of this book, I find myself missing her feisty, prickly presence. She has taught me the importance of getting on with it, whatever it is... writing, fossil-hunting... and of doing something that fires you up and drives you on, through obstacles and setbacks.
Good on you, Lightning Mary!
FOSSILS AND
FOSSIL-HUNTING
Mary often refers to the fossils by their local names so here is a brief summary of their formal identities, as well as a few definitions of other geological terms relevant to her:
Angel’s wings: Also known as Fool’s Gold, this is iron pyrite. Not a fossil but a very pretty, shiny mineral. Its structure is curious, made of very precise geometric forms, including cuboids, framboids (raspberry shapes!) and dodecahedral shapes. I imagine the piece Mary found was particularly large and sculptural. White iron pyrite was popular with the Romans and the Victorians, who made extensive use of it in marcasite jewellery, setting small, faceted pieces in silver.
Coprolites: oddly shaped fossils often found in the region of the abdomens of ichthyosaur skeletons, which Mary determined were fossilised dinosaur faeces. Later named ‘coprolites’ by Buckland.
Devil’s toenails: the lurid name given to an extinct bivalve mollusc, not unlike an oyster. It looks, at a pinch, like a very thick, greyish- white toenail!
Ichthyosaur: a reptile that lived in the Mesozoic seas while dinosaurs roamed on the land. Extinct for about 90 million years, the specimen found by Mary and Joseph Anning was the first to come to the attention of the scientific community in London. Mary went on to find further ichthyosaur skeletons.
Scuttles: extinct marine creatures somewhat akin to cuttlefish.
Snakestones and ram’s horns are are both ammonites the choice of name no doubt referred to their appearance, depending on whether they looked more like a curled- up snake or more heavily ribbed like a ram’s horn. Ammonites are the fossilised shells of a group of predators known as cephalopods, which includes their living relatives the octopus, squid, cuttlefish and nautilus.
Thunderstones, Devil’s fingers, ladies’ fingers: belemnites – the fossilised shells of another extinct cephalopod which looked very like a tiny modernday squid. The first of these common names reflected a belief that these were thunderbolts from God. The others refer to their bullet- shaped form.
Verteberries (sometimes called ‘crocodile teeth’) were, as Mary learned, individual ichthyosaur vertebrae.
You can go fossil-hunting on Charmouth and other Lyme Bay beaches too, but go with a guide. The Blue Lias consists of a sequence of limestone and shale layers, laid down at the end of Triassic and the start of Jurassic times, between 195 and 200 million years ago. It is these layers which make the Jurassic coast such a treasure trove but also means the cliffs are as treacherous today as they ever were. Landslips are not uncommon. People have been killed, and exploring the cliffs on your own is simply not worth the risk.
Stemettes endorses Lightning Mary because it tells the story of an inspirational female scientist, Mary Anning, who made numerous discoveries. In the nineteenth century, being female and working class was a tremendous barrier for individuals who wanted to gain an education and develop scientific knowledge. Lightning Mary demonstrates that a scientist can come from any background and that age, gender and money should not stop them.
But though 200 years have passed since Mary Anning was a girl, women are still not proportionally represented in Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths fields, collectively known as STEM subjects. Of the people working in the UK’s STEM industries, just 21% are women.
Stemettes is a social enterprise working across the UK, Ireland and beyond to inspire and support the next generation of girls and women into STEM industries by showing them the amazing women already in STEM via a series of panel events, hackathons, exhibitions, and mentoring schemes.
If you’re a student or school-leaver who would like to find out more about events and schemes near you, check out www.stemettes.org and click on ‘Events’.
If you are a teacher, parent or work with young people, please email [email protected] to find out more about school trips, clubs and visits.
You can also see what Stemettes is getting up to here:
twitter.com/Stemettes
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Ellie Macklow-Smith, daughter of a very dear friend, who read the first few chapters, encouraged me to finish the story and then read the first full draft. Ellie loved Mary’s ‘sheer feminism’ and that ‘she doesn’t back down, she doesn’t let men and status put her off!’ Mary and Ellie have much in common!
Chloe Sackur, from Andersen, whose editorial notes were invaluable and who saved me from a couple of hilarious continuity errors, including not one but two very temporary babies!
I made use of factual information from the internet and Patricia Pierce’s book Jurassic Mary: Mary Anning and the Primeval Monsters (The History Press) but for everything else I just channelled Mary and her insistent voice in my head, telling me how it was for her, and of her pain at the loss of her father – something I could identify with only too well.
Lightning Mary Page 17
