Mary Anning - III

Once while searching for fossils after a storm, Mary came across a winged creature unlike anything she had ever encountered. This fossil had a long tail with dozens of vertebrae, hints of claws and wings and an enormous skull, rounded jaw and long beak. The entire fossil was less than four feet long. It looked to be a cross between a vampire bat and some kind of reptile. Mary’s discovery would eventually be called a Dimorphodon, the earliest type of Jurassic pterosaur. But, like before, Mary was not given credit for the discovery. 

It was the first pterosaur — or “winged lizard” — ever discovered outside of Germany. First appearing about 200 million years ago — almost 70 million years before the first known bird — pterosaurs had existed alongside dinosaurs. A contemporary of Mary’s earlier finds, the ichthyosaur and the plesiosaur, the pterosaur was believed to be the biggest creature ever to fly. Over time, other pterosaur skeletons would be found. Although some were as small as today’s birds, others had wingspans of nearly 40 feet.

In March 1829, she uncovered the second complete skeleton of the long-necked plesiosaur. So magnificent was the skeleton that an international battle erupted between museums wishing to be the first to showcase it. Finally, the British Museum purchased it for £105 pounds. The Edinburgh Philosophical Journal made mention of her fossil finds that year in the first-ever published list of Britain’s greatest geological collections. 

In December 1829, Mary came across a fossil that wasn’t enormous in size but certainly was peculiar in appearance. A mere 18 inches long, it had a long snout and looked a bit like a fish, but not a regular one. In 1833, scientists agreed that the fossil was indeed a fish, a fish-eating chimaeroid with a body like an otter’s and a flat tail like a beaver’s. The name chimaeroid was derived from a fire breathing she-monster in Greek mythology that boasts a lion’s body and a serpent’s tail.

It was a fossil of a cartilaginous fish — a fish later lumped together with the likes of sharks, skates, rays, and other vertebrates with internal skeletons made entirely of cartilage. It was ancestor to both the shark and the ray. To the untrained eye, the importance of the find might have seemed somewhat contrived. But it was a significant find because it was a transitional creature between sharks and rays. Most important for Mary, it was her fourth major discovery, one that kept her in the spotlight for some time.

Mary ended 1830 on a high note unearthing that December yet another species of plesiosaur, a large-skulled creature with a neck at least three times as long as its head. What made it still more interesting was that resting on the bones of the pelvis was its Coprolite (fossilized feces) finely illustrated. Eventually this creature was deemed to be a new type of plesiosaur — one with more neck bones than other types. As usual it was never mentioned during the formal proceedings that it was Mary who originally found the plesiosaur.

One of the few scientists who had acknowledged her work was a Swiss-born American biologist and geologist Luis Agassiz. In 1841, he would pay Mary her official due by naming a species of fish after her: the Acrodus anningiae. In 1844 he named yet another species of fish after her: Belenostomus anningiae. Such acts of respect for women were unheard of among Mary’s British colleagues. Every one of her own finds had been named after men. In July 1846, Mary was paid some due locally when she was named the first honorary member of the new Dorset County Museum in Dorchester, established the same year. 

Lacking adequate treatment, Mary Anning finally succumbed to breast cancer, dying on Tuesday, March 9, 1847, after having endured serious pain for at least two years. Her body was buried in the yard outside St. Michael’s church that overlooks the sea, at the top of the eroding Church Cliffs she had combed so often. Members of the church and the Geological Society in London paid tribute to Mary with a stained-glass window at St. Michael’s that portrays six acts of mercy from the Bible. The window was dedicated “in commemoration of her usefulness in furthering the science of geology . . . her benevolence of heart, and integrity of life.” 

By the end of her life she had become one of the most recognized names in geological circles, working closely with many of Europe’s most famous learned gentlemen scientists. With them, she’d debated the meaning of fossils and resolved disagreements. Mary’s steady stream of discoveries, begun when she was 12, had laid the foundations for groundbreaking reports on a broad array of bizarre prehistoric creatures.

Even London’s literary giant, Charles Dickens knew of her life. He wrote about Mary in his weekly literary magazine. In it he praised her “good stubborn English perseverance,” her intuition, her courage, physical and mental, in the face of locals who initially mocked her eccentricity. In his article, Dickens highlighted the strange lack of appreciation and the overall disregard for Mary from those in her own town.

At scientific societies, such as the Royal Society and the Geological Society, men still held sway, as women were barred until 1919. Even in the 1830s, men still regarded women as mostly weak and frivolous, more of a hindrance than a help in the scientific arena. Mary complained how “these men of learning have sucked her brains, and made a great deal by publishing works of which she furnished the contents, while she derived none of the advantages." But what was even worse was the careless disregard of museums when handling her discoveries.

As for Mary’s actual discoveries, many aren’t there. Some are housed in various institutions across the country, but too many have been lost or misplaced. The skull of the first ichthyosaur found by Mary’s brother, Joseph, in 1811 is on display at the Natural History Museum in London. The rest of the 17-foot skeleton is nowhere to be found. Although the British Museum purchased the whole specimen in 1819, it either neglected to keep the body or else somehow lost track of it over the years. 

It was fossils like the ones Mary discovered that scientists relied on the most in helping them to decipher the global geologic record. It was Mary’s spectacular marine reptiles that pushed them into finally contemplating a different explanation for the world’s origin. Mary’s many finds also laid the groundwork for Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, elucidated in his 1859 On the Origin of Species. Darwin drew on Mary’s fossilized creatures as irrefutable evidence that life in the past was nothing like life in the present. At the time, merely suggesting such an idea was considered outrageous and even downright blasphemous.

London’s Natural History Museum refers to Mary on its website as the “greatest fossil hunter ever known.” Stephen Jay Gould said, "Mary Anning [is] probably the most important unsung (or inadequately sung) collecting force in the history of paleontology."

Mary Anning - II

Between about 1815 and 1819, when Mary was not even 20, she unearthed several more complete specimens of ichthyosaurs. Some she uncovered were only the size of a trout; others, nearly as big as a baleen whale. For scientists, Mary’s skeletons provided a picture of the kind of creatures that inhabited the seas during the remote past. For geologists, the ichthyosaur specimens raised the possibility that a link once existed between fish and reptile.

In spite of her fossil finds, she was struggling to make ends meet but fortunately she somehow managed to draw the attention of a very important admirer. He had a fossil collection which he decided to sell. The sale brought in more than £400 — comparable to nearly $50,000 today — all of which he handed over to the Annings. For the first time in their lives, Mary and her family were financially secure. The event also delivered a much-needed publicity boost, and across Europe, an increasing number of fossil collectors began asking about this young woman from Lyme Regis named Mary Anning, the young recipient of the auction’s proceeds. 

A year after the auction, in early 1821, she discovered and excavated a beautifully preserved ichthyosaur only five feet long. That same month she spent days digging out another much larger ichthyosaur skeleton, this one a fearsome 20 feet long. Later that year she found another five-foot fossil that was eventually named Ichthyosaurus vulgaris. Early in 1822 she retrieved yet another large ichthyosaur, this one at least nine feet long. As before, these finds were credited not to her but to the monied gentlemen collectors who purchased them.

By 1823, when Mary was 24, the family’s financial situation was once again precarious. The fossil business was an unpredictable one and, as geology grew into a popular science, there were more people hunting for fossils, meaning more competition. Early in the year, Mary sold an exceptionally well- preserved ichthyosaur skeleton to a collection of geologists. But, as usual, during the presentation, the lecturer failed to mention the young woman who had found it.

This time, however, the oversight did not go unnoticed. Local geologist and fossil collector George Cumberland immediately fired off a letter to a Bristol newspaper praising the “persevering industry of a young female fossilist of the name of Hanning.” (He spelled her name the way local Dorset residents pronounced it.) He told readers how Mary had removed from the cliffs “relics of a former world . . . at the continual risk of being crushed by the suspended fragments they leave behind. . . . [T]o her exertions we owe nearly all the fine specimens of Ichthyosauri of the great collections."

Then she discovered a strange creature that resembled a turtle with a flat mouth and stubby short tail and, oddest of all, an abnormally long neck. It was named Plesiosaurus, meaning “near to reptile.” News of the find spread to the eminent Georges Cuvier who expressed suspicions that the new animal might be a sham. The length of the neck seemed unrealistic. To the scientific community, Cuvier was far too good at what he did to be wrong. If he was dubious, then everyone else would be too.

For Mary, Cuvier’s misgivings were a disaster. If he convinced others that the new fossil was a forgery, the Anning family’s reputation could be ruined forever. At a special meeting to arbitrate on the matter, many recognized that its features precisely matched all the earlier similar findings of parts of an animal. After a lengthy discussion, the society members were convinced that Mary’s skeleton wasn’t a fake. Perhaps for the first time, Cuvier was shown to be fallible. Later, after more careful study of Mary’s drawings and eventually the bones themselves, Cuvier admitted that he’d rushed to judgment and made a mistake. In The Fossil Hunter, Shelley Emling writes: 

It was Mary’s discovery of the plesiosaur that gave impetus to serious contemplations on evolution, which would years later feed into Darwin’s theories on evolution. Although the ichthyosaur was the first extinct animal known to science, it wasn’t completely unlike modern dolphins and tuna. But plesiosaurs were so different from any modern animal that they couldn’t be so easily dismissed as a variety of a known existing creature.

Mary continued digging up fossils that fit no blueprint previously imagined. She discovered several new species of ammonites and continued to master anatomy by cutting up and studying both the soft tissue of modern fish and the dried up bones of ancient ones, without ever stepping foot inside any museum or university. At a time when a woman did not walk in public with a man to whom she was not related, Mary was visited frequently by many great scholars, all of them men, in search of information as much as fossils. 

For years, while out searching for fossils, Mary had stumbled across twisted, rounded dark-gray pebbles, some with black spots. Often they were no more than four inches long and only an inch or so in diameter. But sometimes they were much larger. On at least a few occasions, Mary had found these stones inside the skeletons of ichthyosaurs, leading her to believe they might be fossilized clumps of undigested food that remained in the intestines, if not ejected at death.

To her, the reason these masses had taken on their puzzling shapes and spiral markings might have been obvious: They simply had passed in a soft form through the intestines of ancient animals. In 1828, a scientist who studied these pebbles that Mary had discovered, named the fossilized feces “coprolites”. The study of fossilized feces would turn out to be one of the most important techniques available to paleontologists. Years later, it was coprology that led scientists to determine that the Tyrannosaurus rex was a carnivore.

Mary Anning - I

Mary Anning is a name that most people would not have heard of. It was only after her death that she gained a group of determined fans researching how such a marginalized person - her sex, regional dialect, lack of formal education, and adherence to the Dissenter faith, a religious strain that didn’t conform to the teachings of the established Church of England - managed to hold her own in a male-dominated field. Even if her name is not familiar, many people would have heard this tongue-twister inspired by her: "She sells sea-shells sitting on the sea-shore."

Mary Anning was born in 1799 in Lyme Regis, in the southwest English county of Dorset. Mary's father, Richard, was a cabinetmaker and amateur fossil collector. By the time she was five or six, Mary was actively hunting for fossils with her father who taught her how to look for and clean the fossils they found on the beach. 

At this time, most people in the Christian world accepted the idea of an earth created in six days in 4004 BC. The land animals harmoniously shared the garden with Adam and Eve. During Noah’s time, the global flood decimated all life except for that which had been brought into his ark. Most people had absolute faith in the fact that species never changed or evolved, or became extinct. The world was pretty simple - there wasn’t any radioactivity or relativity, extinction or evolution, to complicate matters. 

Mary enjoyed one big advantage: the very good fortune of having been born in Lyme Regis alongside some of the most geologically unstable coastlines in the world. Its unstable cliffs held the remains of many ancient reptiles that used to roam the world hundreds of millions of years in the past. There were all sorts of fossils which used to baffle locals - what later were determined to be bivalves, ammonites, belemnites, and brachiopods. Scientists eventually discovered that the cliffs east and west of Lyme Regis portrayed an almost continuous sequence of rock formations spanning the entire Mesozoic Era, also known as the "Age of Reptiles," which spanned from approximately 252 to 66 million years ago. 

Mary's father died when she was eleven after which her schooling was neglected. In those days, most people thought that intellect in a woman was something to be avoided and that educating girls, especially lower class ones, was a waste of time. Only men with a certain amount of wealth or status could vote, attend university, or hold public office. But even at the age of 11, Mary was already very intelligent and articulate despite her rudimentary schooling and could easily converse with adults. 

Fossil hunting was dangerous work. She had often narrowly avoided disaster. Her father’s own spillon the rocks likely had contributed to his death. Whenever the weather became rough, which was quite often, the winds could kick up giant waves with the power to pin even stronger people against rocks and sheer cliff faces. But Mary would ignore the warnings and continue looking for fossils on cliffs that appeared ready to buckle at a moment’s notice. 

Shortly after Mary’s twelfth birthday, a few months after her father had died, her brother spotted an enormous fossil skull of a strange lizard-like creature. Mary searched patiently for nearly a year, working with her hammer, chipping away at the rock, before she found the rest of the skeleton. The creature looked like a mix of a  dolphin, a crocodile, a fish and a lizard. Mary realized that the skeleton was a much greater discovery than the skull had originally indicated. 

Eventually news spread far and wide that a young girl from Lyme Regis had made an incredible find: an entire connected skeleton of a creature never before seen. The creature was named ichthyosaur, or “fish lizard.” Even though the description turned out to be a misnomer, since the creature was neither a fish nor a lizard but rather a sea reptile that lived at the the time of dinosaurs, the name has stuck to this day.

The find was nothing short of a small miracle. No one in the world could recall seeing such a creature before. People started wondering: How could someone have found the remains of a creature that no longer existed when every single being in the world was designed at the same time and with a specific purpose by a loving and all-powerful God? During Mary’s time, it was inconceivable that a completely different world might have existed before humans became a part of it.

But Mary didn’t receive much recognition for her discovery. The Geological Society was becoming a highly influential body but it didn’t admit women, not even as a member’s guest. Britain’s leading anatomist made an address to scientists to describe the skeleton but never mentioned her when thanking those who brought the fossil to the world’s attention. He also incorrectly praised a museum for Mary’s careful cleaning of the fossil. 

By the time she was a teenager, Mary was a voracious reader. Within a few years, she became a self-taught expert in of anatomy, animal morphology, and science illustration. She had an unerring eye for a fossil’s best hiding places, developed through hours of on-the-spot training. Day after day, no matter what the weather, Mary toiled away amid the shaky cliffs prone to landslides. When she wasn’t strolling the beach, she was likely to be found studying not only long-gone animals but also modern ones, dissecting dead squid, cuttlefish, and other soft-bodied cephalopods to find out what they ate, how they lived, and in what ways they moved their bones and muscles.