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.