Mary Anning
1799 – 1847 · United Kingdom
Known for: Fossil hunter of Lyme Regis whose discoveries opened a lost prehistoric world
“She read the cliffs of Lyme Regis and gave the world its first sight of a vanished sea.”
Biography
Mary Anning was born on 21 May 1799 in Lyme Regis, a small seaside town on the Dorset coast of south west England, into a family living at the edge of poverty. Her father, Richard Anning, was a cabinetmaker who added to his income by prising fossils out of the coastal cliffs and selling them to visitors, and he took his children with him to the shore. Of the ten children born to him and his wife Molly, only Mary and her older brother Joseph survived to adulthood. Her schooling amounted to a Congregationalist Sunday school, where she learned to read and write; everything else she knew she taught herself, from the cliffs and from the scientific papers she copied out by hand.
The cliffs at Lyme Regis are Blue Lias and Charmouth Mudstone, limestone and shale laid down on a shallow seabed early in the Jurassic, and they gave up their fossils chiefly in winter, when rain loosened the rock and landslides exposed bone that had to be reached before the sea took it back. Anning worked them in that season, at real risk to her life. When she was twelve she and Joseph recovered the first ichthyosaur skeleton to be correctly identified as such. She went on to find the first two nearly complete plesiosaur skeletons and the first pterosaur skeleton found outside Germany, along with many fish fossils. Her close observation established that the objects then called bezoar stones were fossilised faeces, and that belemnites preserved ink sacs like those of living cephalopods. Geologists from Britain, Europe and America came to her shop to buy specimens and to ask her about anatomy.
Recognition came unevenly. As a woman she could not join the Geological Society of London, her name was often left off the papers describing her finds, and money was a constant worry; the only scientific writing she published in her lifetime was an extract from a letter in the Magazine of Natural History in 1839. Her friend the geologist Henry De la Beche painted Duria Antiquior, the first widely circulated picture of prehistoric life, largely from specimens she had found, and sold prints for her benefit. Anning died of breast cancer in Lyme Regis on 9 March 1847, aged forty seven. De la Beche read a eulogy to her before the Geological Society, an honour it had never granted to anyone outside its membership. The creatures she pulled from the Dorset cliffs stand in museums still, and the questions they raised about the age of the earth outlived all who asked them.