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.
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