Mary Anning, early paleontologist and fossil hunter
The United Kingdom is a treasure trove of fossils, from dinosaurs to shellfish. The Enlightenment period (late 1600s and the early 1800s) brought with it a sense of importance to empirical observations, but also to classifying and organizing things. When the Industrial Revolution took place in the late 1700s to early 1800s, land became exposed to make railroads, quarries, tunnels, and canals. These actions created great opportunities for fossil hunters.
The Latin, and later French, origins of the word fossil were very general: something dug up. The word didn't have any more meaning than that, and so people spoke of curious rocks, crystals, teeth, shells, bones, and petrified plants and sea life. But fossil held only that meaning, with no early connection to what are known today as fossils--remains or impression of a prehistoric plant or animal embedded in rock and preserved. The word had to earn its current meaning through decades of learning.
In the 1500s, fossils were considered to come from "sports of nature" or Noah's flood. They were considered curiosities of rock, not biological origins.
In the 1660s–1670s, Danish scientist Nicholas Steno not only showed that triangular rocks called "tongue stones" were actually ancient preserved shark teeth, and he proposed three principles of geology that remain in use today:
- sediment layers are deposited flat
- the oldest layers are at the bottom, youngest at the top
- layers extend outward until they thin out or are cut off
The idea that fossil shells and other samples were actually biological remains and not simply rock curiosities grew into the 1700s. The age of the Earth was challenged with more geological findings, and a biblical age was being replaced with evidence to show that it was formed with long-term, slow, continuous processes that would tend to favor the slow formation of fossils. Scientists and private collectors were starting to notice that certain types of fossils were consistently found in particular rock layers, but they didn’t yet have a systematic method for using this information to understand Earth’s history. They instead just thought fossils were found in limestone and sandstone but wouldn’t systematically link them to the order that the sediments were deposited or use them to guess the relative ages of layers. (Dating of rocks with radioactive elements didn't start until 1907 by Bertram Boltwood.) Fossils were noted, collected, and described, but rarely mapped or correlated across regions of the UK and Europe.
Enter Richard Anning and his wife Molly.
Richard was a cabinet maker and carpenter who moved to the county of Dorset in southern England ini 1793. They settled in a new resort town of Lyme Regis (population 1,250 then) that had been made accessible to wheeled vehicles by a new road in 1758 to boost the area's economy. People began to travel there and other coastal areas when doctors began to talk about therapeutic effects of ocean air, bathing in saltwater, and even drinking it.
Lyme Regis was in the center of a rocky coast containing beaches and high cliffs from Exmouth in East Devon to Studland Bay in Dorset, a distance of about 154 km (96 miles). This stretch of coastline was named Jurassic Coast in the 2000s for reasons that will become apparent. It is England's only World Heritage Site.
They had 10 children, but only the last two survived poor health conditions and a fire. The last was Mary Anning, born on May 21, 1799. Her father supplemented his income by collecting fossils from the coast to tourists, and his charismatic nature made him quite popular with high class collectors. Since two busy roads passed right in front of their coastal home, it wasn't hard to set up a table and attract their business.
Richard died after an accident in 1810 at 44, when Mary was only 11, but not before teaching her and her brother Joseph something about finding, excavating, and polishing fossils in the area. She was on the beaches at age 5 helping him out.
The coast has much exposed blue lias, a series of layers of limestone and shale laid down from the late Triassic and early Jurassic times, (195-200 million years ago). Quarries during Mary's time had exposed rocky formations inland what the ocean waves hadn't from the cliffs, and lias was used not just for building blocks but also for the lime content for making mortar.
During the Jurassic period, most of England was underwater, and its future land was being populated by sea creatures that turned into fossils. This explains why the blue lias was also very rich in fossils like ammonites, members of the mollusk family from 140 million years ago. These were common fossils sought by collectors.
With her father having passed away, Mary tried to continue his hobby of providing fossils so the family could make money. This was the time of the Napoleonic Wars, and there were food shortages in England along with rising prices. Richard had owed 120 pounds (about 12,000 pounds equivalent today, about $16,255 USD and ¥2,389,600 JPY), and the family still needed to pay rent.
In 1811, when Mary was 12, her brother found something tremendous on the coastal cliffs. It was a 1.2-meter (4-foot) long skull of an ichthyosaurus, a marine reptile with the narrow head like a crocodile. Mary spent several months digging further to uncover the rest of the body's skeleton by 1812.
They sold it to a collector for 23 pounds. It was later sold again and labeled "Crocodile in a fossil state". Sir Everard Home of the Royal Society of London published a paper on it, but never mentioned Mary or Joseph.
In the next decade, Lieutenant-Colonel Thomas Birch became one of Mary's best fossil customers. In May 1820, he was so taken with the diligence of their fossil hunting and their poverty that he sold his entire collection and donated about 400 pounds to the Annings, making sure to announce who had found the fossils.
Around that time, many professional naturalists were having difficulty sorting out what types of animals these fossils were, often from only fragments of their bodies. Joseph had started working as an upholsterer's apprentice to bring in more money, but Mary continued fossil hunting. Then, she made another discovery in 1823: a plesiosaur. This is a long-necked marine reptile resembling a sea serpent in modern language. Until much later identification, many thought it was merely a turtle with a long neck.
Georges Cuvier, a renowned expert in the field of paleontology, thought it was a fake until he saw it for himself. From then on, she became famous, and many people came to Lyme Regis just to seek her out for advice. However, despite being a recognized expert, the male-dominated scientific community refused to list her in their own findings. For example, despite being recognized through Europe as a great fossil hunter, a personal letter of hers was labeled by the British Museum as “lacking importance”. One exception was George Cumberland, a famous art collector. In 1823, upon displaying a new ichthyosaur that Mary had uncovered, he wrote of her specifically in a newspaper (using a local dialect which misspelled her name):
the very finest specimen of a Fossil Ichthyosaurus ever found in Europe, a specimen that sets at rest all further investigation...of that remarkable aquatic animal, which we owe intirely to the persevering industry of a young female fossilist, of the name of Hanning [sic] of Lyme in Dorsetshire, and her dangerous employment.
He then described the dangers.
This persevering female has for years gone daily in search of fossil remains of importance at every tide, for many miles under the hanging cliffs at Lyme, whose fallen masses are her immediate object, as they alone contain these valuable relics of a former world, which must be snatched at the moment of their fall, at the continual risk of being crushed by the half suspended fragments they leave behind, or be left to be destroyed by the returning tide: - to her exertions we owe nearly all the fine specimens of Ichthyosauri of the great collections; and, to shew that it is one which rewards industry a single specimen of her's, far inferior to this placed in the Institution was lately sold to the College of Surgeons [as a result of the publicity of the Birch sale] for the sum of One Hundred Pounds.
She began identifying fossilized feces (coprolites) in 1824. Inside or outside the animal source, these provided a link to the animals that produced them. She was likely the first person to look inside coprolites to see fish remains, scales, and bones, which helped people learn what the animals ate.
Also in 1824, Mary found a Brittle star, a relative of starfish.
In 1828, Mary made not one but two discoveries.
- the sheath and ink bag of a Belemnosepia, an invertebrate relative to squid and cuttlefish (which she dissected to investigate their anatomy)
- a winged reptile Pterodactylus macronyx (Britain's first example)
Mary then discovered a new type of fish in 1829, the Squalo-raja (45 cm, 17 inches). In fact, she found only the front half and sold it to one buyer, and later found a second half and sold it to another. It's like a cross between a shark and a ray. This was something Mary herself deduced when she practiced comparative anatomy by dissecting a ray. She decided that the vertebrae anatomy alone indicated that it was different.
Sir Henry Thomas De la Beche was one of the few men in science who helped Mary Anning and who lived in Lyme Regis. Together, they searched for fossils as teenagers, then later he became the first director of the Geological Survey of Great Britain, and the first President of the Palaeontographical Society. Although he did not include her name as a source for sampled he described, he defended her many scientific claims. He drew a colorful picture Duria Antiquior, A More Ancient Dorset in 1830 depicting life when the fossils she found was teeming on Earth. It won so much acclaim with his colleagues that he commissioned a lithographic copy and sold many of them, with money going to Mary.
By 1838, Mary's fossil shop had started earning 25 pounds as a grant from the British Association for the Advancement of Science and the British government.
The naturalist and Swiss paleontologist Louis Agassiz visited Lyme Regis in 1834 on vacation and found himself talking with Mary Anning. He was impressed with her knowledge and later named two specimens of fish after her, Acrodus anningiae and Belenostomus anningiae in the 1840s. Others followed with similar accolades only after she died.
Geologist and paleontologist William Buckland met Mary when she was 16 and taught her about geology and paleontology. He was the first to describe fossil remains as that of a dinosaur. He worked with her on fossilized feces and coined the name coprolites. Buckland also kept a supply of the Duria Antiquior prints to hand out at his lectures. It was Buckland who recommended the annual stipend to her in 1838. However, she was barred from joining scientific circles as an equal. As a result, Mary herself never published her findings, except to sketch what she'd uncovered and to write messages to collectors and museums.
Mary Anning's accomplishments in paleontology will not be forgotten. Books have been written about her, and a movie Ammonite was based on her life. She was mentioned in the movie The French Lieutenant's Woman, too. An international meeting of historians, palaeontologists, fossil collectors, and others met on the 200th anniversary of her birth. Coins and stamps have been issued in her honor. But most importantly, her collections of fossils are found all over the world, earning her the title "greatest fossil hunter".
