Mary Anning

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Mary Anning
Born	May 21, 1799(1799-05-21) Lyme Regis, England
Died	March 9, 1847 (aged 47) Lyme Regis, England
Occupation	Fossil collector and paleontologist
Religious beliefs	Congregational church later coverted to Anglican
Parents	Richard and Mary Anning

Mary Anning (May 21, 1799 – March 9, 1847) was an early British fossil collector and paleontologist. Her skill in locating and preparing fossils, as well as the richness of the Jurassic era marine fossil beds at Lyme Regis, resulted in her making a number of important finds. These included the skeleton of the first ichthyosaur skeleton to be recognized as such and the first two plesiosaur skeletons ever found, the first pterosaur skeleton found outside of Germany, and some important fossil fish. Her observations also played a key role in the discoveries that belemnite fossils contained fossilized ink sacs, and that coprolites, known as bezoar stones at the time, were fossilized feces. The geologist Henry De la Beche painted Duria Antiquior, the first scene out of deep time to be widely circulated, based largely on fossils she had found, and sold prints for her benefit. Her work played a key role in the fundamental and far reaching changes that occurred in the early 19th century in ideas about prehistoric life and the history of the earth.

Anning's gender and social class, her parents were poor and religious dissenters, prevented her from fully participating in the scientific community of early 19th century Britain, which was dominated by wealthy Anglican gentlemen. As a result of this, she did not always receive full credit for her contributions. Despite this she became well known in geological circles in Britain, Europe, and America, but she struggled financially for much of her life.

Contents 1 Biography 1.1 Childhood 1.2 Fossils as a family business 1.3 Fossil shop and growing expertise 1.4 Interactions with the scientific community 1.5 Financial difficulties, religious conversion 1.6 Illness and death 2 Major discoveries 3 Impact and legacy 4 Notes 5 Bibliography 6 See also 7 Further reading 8 External links

[edit] Biography

[edit] Childhood

Born in the coastal southern English town of Lyme Regis in Dorset,^[1] Mary's father, Richard, was a cabinet maker who supplemented his income by mining the coastal cliff-side fossil beds near Lyme Regis, and selling his finds to tourists. Richard Anning moved to Lyme from Colyton in Devon. He married Mary Moore, known as Molly, on 8 August 1793 in Blandford. Returning to Lyme, the couple lived in a house built on the town’s bridge, and attended the local Congregational Church, where their children were baptized. As religious dissenters, the Annings faced legal and social discrimination. Soon after their marriage a daughter Mary was born. She was followed by a second daughter, Martha, who died almost at once, then by a son Joseph, in 1796. In 1798 a second son, Henry, died in infancy and the eldest child, Mary, was burned to death, possibly while trying to feed wood shavings into a fire. When another daughter was born the following May, she was given the name of her dead sister, Mary.^[2]

In 1800, when she was 15 months old, an extraordinary event occurred. Mary was being held by a neighbor, Elizabeth Haskings, who was standing with two friends under an elm tree watching an outdoor show, when lightning struck the tree. The three women were killed, but onlookers realised the infant was still alive and rushed her home. A local doctor called her survival miraculous, and for years afterword members of her community would attribute the child's curiosity, intelligence, and lively personality to the incident.^[2]

The Annings had at least four more children: Henry, 1801; Percival, 1803; Elizabeth, 1804; and Richard, 1809. All died within a couple of years of birth, leaving only two surviving children, Joseph and Mary, when their father Richard died in 1810 at age 44, probably of tuberculosis. The Anning family was left without support, and had to apply for parish relief. Mary and her brother Joseph, who had both accompanied their father at times while he searched the nearby cliffs for fossils to sell, began collecting fossils full-time in an effort to earn some income.^[2]

[edit] Fossils as a family business

Fossil collecting was in vogue in the late 18th and early 19th century, at first as a pastime akin to stamp collecting but gradually transforming into a science as the importance of fossils to geology and biology became understood. At the same time more and more wealthy and middle class tourists were visiting Lyme Regis, which was becoming popular as a seaside resort. As their father had before them, Mary and Joseph Anning setup a table of curiosities near where the coach stopped at a local inn and in order to sell to tourists. As time passed, especially after Joseph made an important find of an ichthyosaur skull in 1811 and Mary found the associated skeleton in 1812, they forged relationships within the scientific community, whose passion for fossils grew to be a major source of income for the family.^[3]

In 1818 Mary came to the attention of Thomas Birch, a wealthy fossil collector, when she sold him another ichthyosaur skeleton. A year later, disturbed by the poverty of the Anning family, which was at the point of having to sell their furniture to make ends meet, Birch arranged for the sale of his own fossil collection, the proceeds of which (some £400) were given to the Annings. Besides providing much needed funds, the sale raised the profile of the Anning family in the geologic community. Put on a sure (if somewhat austere) financial footing for the first time in a decade, Mary carried on with her fossil collecting and selling even as her brother devoted more and more time to his new career as an upholsterer.^[3] Her primary stock in trade were invertebrate fossils such as ammonite and belemnite shells, which were common in the area and sold for a few shillings. Vertebrate fossils were much rarer and exceptional specimens like the icthyosaur skeleton could sell for several pounds.^[4] The source of all these fossils were the coastal cliffs which surround Lyme and which are part of a geological formation known as the Blue Lias. This formation consists of alternating layers of limestone and shale laid down as sediment on a shallow seabed early in what would come to be called the Jurassic period (about 210-195 million years ago), and the cliffs are one of the richest fossil locations in Britain.^[5]

[edit] Fossil shop and growing expertise

As Mary Anning continued to make important finds her reputation grew. In 1826, at the age of 27, she managed to save enough money to purchase a home with a glass store front window for her shop which was called Anning's Fossil Depot. The business had become important enough that the move was covered in the local paper, which noted that the shop currently had a fine ichthyosaur skeleton on display. Many geologists and fossil collectors from Europe and even America visited Mary at Lyme to purchase specimens. These included the geologist George William Featherstonhaugh who purchased fossils for the newly opened New York Lyceum of Natural History in 1827.^[6] King Frederick Augustus II of Saxony visited her shop in 1844 and purchased an ichthyosaur skeleton for his extensive natural history collection. When the King's physician and aid, Carl Gustav Carus, asked Mary to write her name in his notebook she did so and beside her name she wrote "I am well known throughout the whole of Europe." Carus also recorded this description of her shop in his journal:"... a shop in which the most remarkable petrifications and fossil remains — the head of an icthyosaurus , beautiful ammonites, etc. were exhibited in the window. We entered and found a little shop and adjoining chamber completely filled with fossil productions of the coast."^[7]

In order to educate herself as much as possible about fossils Mary read as much of the scientific literature as she could get hold of. Often she laboriously hand copied papers she borrowed from others. One historian who had examined a copy she made of a 1824 paper by William Conybeare on marine reptile fossils noted that the copy included several pages of detailed technical illustrations that he was hard pressed to tell apart from the original. She also dissected modern animals including both fish and cuttlefish in order to better understand the anatomy of some of the fossils she worked with. One observer remarked how remarkable it was that a "poor ignorant girl" had arrived at such a degree of knowledge that she was able to speak and correspond with professors and other experts about fossils and that those experts acknowledged that she knew as much as anyone in the Kingdom.^[4] As time passed, her confidence in her knowledge increased, and in 1839 she took the time to write the Magazine of Natural History to correct an article that had mistakenly claimed that a jaw she had found of the prehistoric shark Hybodus represented a new genus, and to make sure that the magazine knew that it was she who had first discovered many years ago the existence of fossil fish with both straight and hooked teeth.^[8]

[edit] Interactions with the scientific community

Besides purchasing specimens many of the leading geologists of the time visited Mary to work with her collecting fossils and to discuss issues of anatomy and classification. Henry De la Beche, who would become one of Britain's leading geologists, collected fossils with Mary (and sometimes with her brother Joseph as well) when they were both still teenagers.^[9] William Buckland who lectured on geology at Oxford often visited Lyme on his Christmas vacations and frequently went collecting with Anning.^[10] In 1839 Buckland, Conybeare, and Richard Owen visited Lyme together so that Mary could lead them on a fossil collecting excursion.^[11] She also sometimes assisted Thomas Hawkins with his efforts to collect icthyosaur fossils at Lyme in the 1830s. She was aware of his penchant to "enhance" the fossils he collected. She wrote: "...he is such an enthusiast that he makes things as he imagines they ought to be; and not as they are really found..."^[12]. A few years later a public scandal would ensue when it was discovered that Hawkins had inserted fake bones to complete marine reptile skeletons that had then been purchased for a large sum by the government for the British Museum.^[13] The Swiss paleontologist Louis Agassiz visited Lyme in 1834 and worked with Mary to obtain and study fish fossils found in the region. He was so impressed by the knowledge of Anning and her friend Elizabeth Philpot that he wrote in his journal: "Miss Philpot and Mary Anning have been able to show me with utter certainty which are the icthyodorulites dorsal fins of sharks that correspond to different types." He thanked both of them for their help in his monumental book, Studies of Fossil Fish.^[14] Another leading British geologist, Roderick Murchison, did some of his first field work in southwest England, including Lyme. He was accompanied by his wife Charlotte who assisted his work. Murchison wrote that they decided that Charlotte should stay behind in Lyme for a few weeks to "become a good practical fossilist, by working with the celebrated Mary Anning of that place...". Charlotte Murchison and Mary would become life long friends and correspondents. Charlotte, who traveled widely and met many prominent geologists through her work with her husband, would help Mary build her network of customers throughout Europe, and Mary would stay with the Murchisons when she visited London. Mary's correspondents included Charles Lyell who wrote her to ask her opinion on how the sea was affecting the coastal cliffs around Lyme, and Adam Sedgwick who taught geology at Cambridge. Even Gideon Mantell visited her at her shop.^[15]

As a woman Mary would always be somewhat of an outsider to the scientific community. At the time in Britain women were not allowed to vote (neither were men who were too poor to meet the property requirement), hold public office, or attend university, and the newly formed but increasingly influential Geological Society would not allow women to attend meetings as guests let alone become members.^[16] Also working against Anning was her working class background and her family's status as religious dissenters, which almost certainly subjected them to discrimination in a conservative town like Lyme Regis. In general the only occupations open to lower class women at the time were farm labour, domestic service, and increasingly work in the newly opening factories. Although Mary knew more about fossils and geology than many of the gentlemen fossilists she sold to, it was always such gentlemen who published the scientific descriptions of the specimens, often neglecting to mention her name. As time grew on she inevitably became resentful of this fact.^[4] Later in her life a young woman who sometimes accompanied Mary while she collected wrote: "She says the world has used her ill...these men of learning have sucked her brains, and made a great deal of publishing works, of which she furnished the contents, while she derived none of the advantages."^[17]

[edit] Financial difficulties, religious conversion

By 1830, because of difficult economic conditions in Britain that reduced the demand for fossils and the long gaps between major finds, she was having financial difficulties again. The geologist Henry De la Beche assisted her by having Georg Scharf make a lithographic print based on his watercolor painting Duria Antiquior of life in prehistoric Dorset, which was largely based on fossils Mary had found. De la Beche then sold copies of the prints to his fellow geologists and other wealthy friends and donated the proceeds to her. This became the first such scene from deep time to be widely circulated.^[18] It also helped that in December of 1830 she finally made another major find, a skeleton of a new type of plesiosaur, that sold for £200.^[19] Also around this time that Mary switched from attending the local Congregational church where she had been baptised and in which she and her family had always been active members to the Anglican church. The switch was prompted by a decline in attendance at the local Congregational Chapel which began when its popular pastor, who had been a fellow fossil collector and friend to Mary, left for the United States to campaign against slavery in 1828, and was replaced with much less agreeable and capable individual. The greater social respectability of the established church, in which many of Mary's gentleman geologist customers like Buckland and Conybeare were ordained clergy, was also a factor. Mary, who was very religiously devout, actively supported her new church as she had her old.^[20]

Mary suffered another serious financial setback in 1835 when she lost most of her life savings, around £300, in a bad investment. Concerned about her financial situation her old friend William Buckland persuaded the British Association for the Advancement of Science and the British government to award her an annuity, known as a Civil list pension, in return for her many contributions to the advancement of geology. The £25 a year pension gave her a certain amount of security.^[21]

[edit] Illness and death

Anning died at the age of 47, of breast cancer. Because of her painful illness, her work had tailed off the last couple of years of her life. A few months before her death she had been made an honorary member of the Geological Society of London despite, as a woman, being ineligible for regular membership. After her death, a eulogy, written by her friend Henry De la Beche, was read at the Geological Society, some members subsequently contributed to a stained-glass window to her memory, in the parish church of St Michael the Archangel in Lyme Regis. The inscription for the window reads: "This window is sacred to the memory of Mary Anning of this parish, who died 9 March AD 1847 and is erected by the vicar and some members of the Geological Society of London in commemoration of her usefulness in furthering the science of geology, as also of her benevolence of heart and integrity of life." The window itself depicts the corporal works of mercy, i.e. feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, clothing the naked, sheltering the homeless, visiting prisoners and visiting the sick.

[edit] Major discoveries

One of Anning's first discoveries was made shortly after her father's death when she was just twelve. She found the first complete skeleton of an ichthyosaur ever discovered, though ichthyosaur fossil fragments had been found in Wales as early as 1699. Her brother had discovered the skull of what appeared to be a large crocodile a year earlier. The rest of the skeleton was not to be found at first, but Mary located it after a storm scoured away a portion of the cliff containing it. It was an important find, and was soon described in the Transactions of the Royal Society. She went on to find two other distinct species of ichthyosaur.

Her next major discovery was a skeleton of a plesiosaur in 1821, the first of its kind to be found. The fossil was subsequently described by William Conybeare as Plesiosaurus dolichodeirus and is the type specimen (holotype) of the species, which itself is the type species of the genus, and in 1823 discovered a second even more complete (the first one had been missing the skull) plesiosaur skeleton. When Conybeare presented his findings on plesiosaurs to a meeting of the Geological Society in 1824 he failed to mention Anning by name even though she had collected both the skeletons he described and he used her sketch of the second skeleton in the presentation.^[22] Conybeare's presentation followed the resolution of a controversy over the legitimacy of one of the fossils. The extremely long neck of the plesiosaur with its unprecedented 35 neck vertebrae had raised the suspicions of the eminent French anatomist Georges Cuvier when he reviewed Anning's drawings of the second skeleton, and he wrote to Conybeare suggesting the possibility the find was a fake produced by combining fossil bones from different kinds of animals. Fraud was far from unknown among early 19th century fossil collectors, and if the controversy had not been resolved promptly the accusation could have seriously damaged Anning's ability to sell fossils to other geologists. Cuvier's accusation had resulted in a special meeting of the Geological Society earlier in 1824, which after some debate had concluded the skeleton was legitimate. Cuvier later admitted he had acted in haste and had been mistaken.^[23]

She found an 'unrivalled specimen' of Dapedium politum, a ray-finned fish, as described in 1828. She discovered an important fossil of a pterosaur, a Pterodactylus macronyx (later renamed by Richard Owen Dimorphodon macronyx), the first found outside Germany and thought to be the first complete skeleton.

Those vertebrate fossil finds left her mark in history, but she continued collecting for the remainder of her life, and made numerous other contributions to early paleontology. In 1826 Anning discovered what appeared to be a chamber containing dried ink inside a belemnite fossil. She showed it to her friend Elizabeth Philpot who was able to revivify the ink and use it to illustrate some of her own icthyosaur fossils, and other local artists were soon doing the same as such ink chambers were found in more fossils. Mary noted how closely the fossilized ink chambers resembled the ink sacs of modern squid and cuttle fish, which she had dissected to better understand the anatomy of fossil cephalopods, and this quickly led her friend the geologist William Buckland to publish the conclusion that Jurassic belemnites had used ink for defense just like many modern cephalopods do.^[24] It was also Anning who noticed that oddly shaped fossils then known as "bezoar stones" were sometimes found in the abdominal region of ichthyosaur skeletons. She also noted that if such stones were broken open they often contained fossilized fish bones and scales as well as sometimes bones from small icthyosaurs. It was these observations by Anning that lead William Buckland to propose in 1829 that the stones were fossilized feces and name them coprolites. In contrast with what had happened with the plesiosaur skeletons years earlier, when Buckland presented his findings on coprolites to the Geological Society he mentioned Anning by name and praised her skill and industry in helping resolve the mystery.^[25]

[edit] Impact and legacy

Taken all together, Mary Anning's discoveries became key pieces of evidence for extinction. Georges Cuvier had put forth his analysis of fossil mammals as evidence for the reality of extinction in the late 1790s. Despite this, in the early 1820s it was still believed by many that animals did not become extinct; any oddities found were explained away as still living somewhere in an unexplored region of the earth. The bizarre nature of the fossils found by Mary Anning, some like the Plesiosaurs so unlike any known living creature, struck a heavy blow against this argument.^[26] They also played a significant role in the development in the 1820s of a new discipline of geohistorical analysis within geology that sought to understand the history of the earth by using evidence from fossils to reconstruct extinct organisms and the environments they lived in; this eventually came to be called paleontology. In particular the Ichthyosaurs, Plesiosaurs, and pterosaur she found, along with the first dinosaur fossils which were found by Gideon Mantell and William Buckland during the same period, provided convincing evidence for another controversial idea of Cuvier's, which was that there had been an "age of reptiles" when reptiles rather than mammals had been the dominant form of animal life.^[27]

After her death, Mary dropped into obscurity but, in recent decades, she has been rediscovered. It is well known that Mary Anning is associated with the old tongue-twister, "She sells sea shells on the sea shore." ^[28] It was composed in 1908, more than a half century after her death, by Terry Sullivan who was inspired by her life story.^[29] The original text was:

She sells seashells on the seashore
The shells she sells are seashells, I'm sure
So if she sells seashells on the seashore
Then I'm sure she sells seashore shells.^[29]

In 2005, a Mary Anning 'facsimile' was created at the Natural History Museum as one of a number of notable gallery characters to patrol its displays. She is thus among other luminaries including Carl Linnaeus, Dorothea Bate, and William Smith.^[30]

Writer John Fowles in The French Lieutenant's Woman (Ch. 8) notes: "One of the meanest disgraces of British palaeontology is that though many scientists of the day gratefully used her finds to establish their own reputation, not one native type bears the name anningii". As one of her biographers noted, this contrasted with the fact that some of the prominent British geologists who had utilized her finds, like Buckland and Roderick Murchison, ended up with multiple fossil species named after them. However, in the 1840s the Swiss - American expert on fossil fish Louis Agassiz did name two fossil fish species, Acrodus anningiae, and Belenostomus anningiae, after her, and another after her friend Elizabeth Philpot. Agassiz was grateful for the help the two women had given him in examining and understanding fossil fish specimens, especially fossil sharks, during his 1834 visit to Lyme Regis. ^[14]

In 2009 Tracy Chevalier wrote a historical novel entitled Remarkable Creatures, which charts Anning's life and discoveries.

[edit] Notes

[edit] Bibliography

• Torrens, Hugh. 1995. "Mary Anning (1799-1847) of Lyme: 'the greatest fossilist the world ever knew'," British Journal for the History of Science, 25:257-284.
• Anon. 1828. "Another discovery by Mary Anning of Lyme. An unrivalled specimen of Dapedium politum an antediluvian fish." Salisbury and Winchester Journal, 108:5599 2.

[edit] See also

• Jurassic Coast
• List of fossil sites (with link directory)
• History of paleontology

[edit] Further reading

• Goodhue, Thomas W (2005), "Mary Anning: the fossilist as exegete.", Endeavour 29 (1): 28–32, 2005 Mar, doi:10.1016/j.endeavour.2004.11.004, PMID 15749150 
• Norman (1999), "Mary Anning and her times: the discovery of British palaeontology (1820-1850).", Trends Ecol. Evol. (Amst.) 14 (11): 420–421, 1999 Nov, doi:10.1016/S0169-5347(99)01700-0, PMID 10511714 
• Laurence Anholt, Stone Girl Bone Girl: The Story of Mary Anning, ISBN 1-84507-700-8, Frances Lincoln Publishers 2006
• Jeannine Atkins, Mary Anning and the Sea Dragon, ISBN 0374348405 ISBN 978-0374348403 , Farrar Straus Giroux 1999
• Don Brown, Rare Treasure: Mary Anning and Her Remarkable Discoveries, ISBN 0-618-31081-9, Houghton Mifflin Co 2003
• Nigel J. Clarke, Mary Anning 1799-1847: A Brief History, ISBN 0-907683-57-6, Clarke (Nigel J) Publications 1998
• Sheila Cole, The Dragon in the Cliff: A Novel Based on the Life of Mary Anning, ISBN 0-595-35074-7, iUniverse.com 2005
• Marie Day, Dragon in the Rocks: A Story Based on the Childhood of the Early Paleontologist, Mary Anning, ISBN 1-895688-38-8, Maple Tree Press 1995
• Emling, Shelley; The Fossil Hunter, Palgrove Macmillan ,London 2009 ISBN 978-0230611566
• Dennis B. Fradin, Mary Anning: The Fossil Hunter (Remarkable Children), ISBN 0-382-39487-9, Silver Burdett Press 1997
• Thomas W. Goodhue, Curious Bones: Mary Anning and the Birth of Paleontology (Great Scientists), ISBN 1-883846-93-5
• Thomas W. Goodhue, Fossil Hunter: The Life and Times of Mary Anning (1799-1847), ISBN 1-930901-55-0, cademica Pr Llc 2004
• Patricia Pierce, Jurassic Mary: Mary Anning and the Primeval Monsters, ISBN 0-7509-4039-5, Sutton Publishing 2006
• Crispin Tickell, Mary Anning of Lyme Regis, ISBN 0-9527662-0-5, Lyme Regis Philpot Museum 1996
• Sally M. Walker, Mary Anning: Fossil Hunter (On My Own Biographies (Hardcover)), ISBN 1-57505-425-6, Carolrhoda Books 2000
• 2007 QCA KS1 Sats Level 3 Reading Paper "Stones and Bones" Section 3: Mary Anning

[edit] External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Mary Anning

Wikisource has the text of the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica article Anning, Mary.

• Duria Antiquior - 'a more ancient Dorsetshire' an 1830 watercolour, by Henry Thomas de la Beche, of the seas of ancient Dorset, designed to highlight Mary Anning's discoveries
• Mary Anning, Finder of Fossils
• Lyme Regis Museum - Mary Anning
• Berkeley article
• A 360 degree panorama of East Cliff at Lyme Regis, the site of Mary Anning's ichthyosaur find in 1811
• song “Mary Anning” by "Artichoke"

Persondata
NAME	Anning, Mary
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION	Geologist, paleontologist
DATE OF BIRTH	May 21, 1799
PLACE OF BIRTH	Lyme Regis, England
DATE OF DEATH	March 9, 1847
PLACE OF DEATH	Lyme Regis, England