Rocky Road: Mary Anning

Mary Anning

From The Beginnings of Western Science by David C. Lindberg

When Mary Anning was just a year old, a traveling circus passed through the village where she lived, and everyone flocked outdoors to see it. A severe thunderstorm began, and the woman holding Anning was struck by lightning and killed, but Anning survived. According to her family, the baby girl became much smarter and livelier as a result. Her intelligence served her family well, as she began collecting and selling fossils (in those days variously nicknamed vertiberries, snake stones, ladies' fingers and devil's toenails) while still a child.

Anning was a commercial collector, but at that time, the commercial market for fossils was not what it is today. (No one would fork over several million dollars for a T. rex skeleton then.) Anning often fell on hard times, sometimes because she couldn't find fossils, and sometimes because the public took no interest in what she did find. Gentlemen geologists occasionally came to her aid, some of them securing a small pension for her late in her life. Geologist and amateur artist Henry De la Beche went so far as to paint "a more ancient Dorset," a cheerful depiction of marine life, representing many of the fossils Anning collected, to rouse public interest in her fossils. Occasional rumors linked De la Beche and Anning romantically, but these might have stemmed from the simple fact that De la Beche, unlike some of his contemporaries and even close friends, was willing to acknowledge Anning's role in science. Anning's most generous acquaintance may have been Lt. Col. Thomas James Birch (later Bosvile) who, when the Annings were desperately selling furniture to make rent, auctioned off the fossils he had previously bought from them and gave the Annings the auction proceeds.

As Anning matured and began to appreciate her own contributions to science, she grew resentful of the scientists who failed to acknowledge her work. She was rumored to detest William Buckland's interpretations of fossils, but no evidence can be found in her correspondence to him, which was usually congenial. Like De la Beche, Gideon Mantell was inclined to recognize her contributions; William Conybeare was less so. Museums could be stingy in their acknowledgments, too. Anning sold fossils to several major institutions, but a recent perusal of museum records showed only one specimen attributed to Anning: a coprolite fossil at Oxford.

Although Anning is often credited with finding the world's first ichthyosaur, it was actually her brother who found it, but she carried out the excavation herself at the tender age of 12. The fossil find became the basis for six papers — all of them stuffy and erroneous — by Everard Home. More skilled anatomists started calling the fossil Ichthyosaurus around 1820. About that time, Anning found the world's first nearly complete plesiosaur, described by Conybeare and De la Beche. She also found the first recognized pterosaur fossil in England (Mantell found pterosaur remains before Anning, but attributed them to a bird). Anning also found fossil cuttlefish that, amazingly, retained their original sepia (ink ejected to thwart predators). Elizabeth Philpot, a wealthy collector and friend of Anning's, used the sepia in illustrations, and Buckland recounted how a "celebrated painter" described the fossil ink as "of excellent quality."

Anning had a short and often difficult life. She started selling fossils as a child because her father had died, and her mother and brother needed the money. Out of nine children, Anning and her brother were the only ones to survive to adulthood; she was actually named after a sister who died shortly before Anning was born. Her father was a Dissenter (of another faith than Anglican), which, in early 19th-century England, could be a major impediment to worldly success. Anning eventually converted to the Church of England — a practical decision since many of her customers were Anglican, but the move was probably motivated by genuine faith, too. Anning had the good fortune to live where fossils eroded out of the shoreline, and she had the intelligence to recognize their significance. Still, the work was dangerous; rock falls could happen at any time. She narrowly escaped a landslide that killed her dog, and barely missed being crushed by a runaway cart. An acquaintance remarked that Anning read the Bible more often after one such brush with death. In the end, she died in her 40s of breast cancer. By the time she died, she had become so well known that Charles Dickens's journal All the Year Round reported "the carpenter's daughter has won a name for herself, and deserved to win it."

For more information:
The Dragon Seekers by Christopher McGowan
Terrible Lizard by Deborah Cadbury
Gideon Mantell and the Discovery of Dinosaurs by Dennis R. Dean
Scenes from Deep Time by Martin J.S. Rudwick
"Mary Anning: The Fossilist as Exegete" by Thomas W. Goodhue in Endeavour Magazine, March 2005 issue
Fossils: Evidence of Vanished Worlds by Yvette Gayrard-Valy
Finders, Keepers by Rosamond Wolff Purcell and Stephen Jay Gould
The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Pterosaurs by Peter Wellnhofer
The Great Naturalists edited by Robert Huxley
Bridgewater Treatise VI: Geology and Minerology by William Buckland
Fossil Revolution by Douglas Palmer
Rocks and Fossils by Arthur B. Busbey III, et al.