Mary Anning was a poor self-taught fossil collector whose carefully documented finds expanded human knowledge of ancient life but was long ignored by the scientific community due to her lack of a degree or even a university degree.
early years
Mary Anning was born in 1799 in the English resort town of Lyme Regis, England. The city, which was positioned as a budget alternative to expensive resorts, had another feature associated with the coastline.
About 200 million years ago, during the Jurassic period, this coastline was covered by a warm sea teeming with prehistoric life. Eventually, the sea retreated, but the soft sedimentary rocks that formed the seabed remained, and the remains of the animals that were buried on the seabed slowly turned to stone on their own. Part of the seabed has eroded to form rocks; each wave or fierce storm eroded them, revealing an abundance of fossils.
Mary's father, cabinetmaker Richard, chose Lyme Regis because of wealthy tourists looking for a breath of sea air to sell his produce. But soon Richard found another source of income: he began to walk on the beaches, selling small fossils to tourists as a souvenir. By the time Mary was 6 years old, she was constantly present with her father, helping him find, excavate and clean up fossils.... In November 1810, an accident (falling off a cliff), combined with tuberculosis, cut short Richard's life, leaving his wife a widowed mother of two, pregnant with her third child and a beggar. To complicate matters, the Annings were "dissent" or non-Anglican Protestants. This did not improve their relations with neighbors, but it became the reason why all the children in the family were able to read.
A few months after her father's death, Mary went to collect the fossils on her own. And luck smiled at her: Mary discovered a large ammonite that a wealthy tourist had bought for half a crown - more than anyone had ever paid Richard for a fossil. Once Anning realized that she could make money for her family by collecting and selling fossils, her trips to the beach became regular.
First discoveries
Less than a year later, Anning, with the help of her brother, discovered a fossil that puzzled scientists. It was over five meters long and had 60 vertebrae. The excavation took months, and by the time they were finished, word had spread throughout the city that they had found the monster. Part of it looked like a fish, and part - like a crocodile. London academia had never seen anything like it before. It was eventually named ichthyosaur, which means lizard fish. Ichthyosaur fossils have been found before, but Mary Anning's specimen was the first complete skeleton to throw the scientific world into disarray .
- I do not by any means consider it completely fish compared to other fish, but rather view it in the same light as those animals that were encountered in New South Wales, which seem to represent many deviations from the usual structures, ”wrote the British surgeon Everard Home, who examined the fossil in 1814 in his article. He mentioned the name of the landowner who owned the cliff, but did not say a word about Mary Anning.
Scientific drawing of the skull of an ichthyosaur found by Mary and Joseph Anning. (Image credit: House of Everard / Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 1814)
The skeleton of the ichthyosaurus caused a lively discussion in the scientific world, various explanations of its origin were put forward (it must be remembered that before the appearance of Darwin's evolutionary theory there was still half a century). Mary, naturally, did not participate in this discussion. But she knew perfectly well that she had found something unusual, since the fossil was sold for 23 pounds sterling, this money was enough to feed the family for several months, which for a teenage girl was much more important than any academic disputes. The buyer donated the skeleton to a private museum, then it went to the British Museum and, finally, to the Natural History Museum in London, where today only a skull remains.
Anning continued to hunt for fossils, and between 1815 and 1819 she found several more complete skeletons of ichthyosaurs, which then ended up in local museums or used on lecture tours around the country. Almost always, lecturers who talked about their theories of anatomy or the origin of ichthyosaurs did not mention the girl who found, removed and cleaned up the fossils that made their presentations so popular.
Anning's next major find was even more controversial than her first ichthyosaur. In 1823, according to information from the Natural History Museum of Great Britain, she discovered the complete skeleton of a plesiosaur, an extinct four-limbed sea lizard. And just a few years later, in 1828, she unearthed the fossilized skeleton of a pterosaur, a winged reptile that lived in the age of the dinosaurs, first found outside Germany .
During her life, Mary discovered several species of extinct fish, as well as a number of other sea creatures. Together with the English paleontologist William Buckland, she pioneered the study of coprolites - fossilized feces.
Finally scientific recognition?
But the scientific community was slow to acknowledge Anning's accomplishments. One of the most positive lifetime assessment was given to her Lady Harriet Silvester, a wealthy widow, visited Mary in 1824:
- Sure, it's a great example of divine providence - that this poor, ignorant girl has received such a blessing because by reading and applying it reached to the degree of knowledge that she has a habit of writing and talking with professors and other smart people about this, and they all admit that she knows more about science than anyone else in this kingdom .
Mary's recognition was hampered not only by her gender, but also by the lack of formal education, a strong suburban accent and poverty. In addition, at that time it was simply customary to record information about collectors who donated fossils to the museum, and not at all about those who found these fossils and sold them to collectors. Fossil hunters in general were not people to whom the scientific community paid much attention.
Anning was recognized as a successful fossil collector, but nothing more. Meanwhile, according to some recollections, she knew more about her findings than many of those who showed them to the public.Mary read all the scientific literature on the topic that she could find, copied articles from magazines to keep them at home. At the same time, she so carefully redrawn illustrations that the researchers of her work noted "it is difficult to distinguish the original from the copy." She described and sketched her findings just as carefully.
However, it cannot be said that she was completely ignored. When she died of breast cancer in 1847, the Geological Society of London's quarterly journal published her obituary. This was the first time they honored someone who was not a member of the community as such (the community did not accept women as members until 1904).
However, after her death, Anning was quickly and permanently forgotten. The memory has been preserved in the form of a tale that one famous English tongue twister is dedicated to her - “she sells seashells by the seashore” . However, according to folklorist Stephen Winick, there is no evidence of this connection. “ I think the most important reason for the popularity of Mary Anning's story and tongue twisters is that it satisfies the current social need for recognition of innovative women scientists… ” Vinik writes. " In culture, there is usually a feeling that women scientists are not given the attention they deserve and that we have a responsibility to fix that ."
The real recognition of Mary Anning's merits for paleontology happened already in our century. A number of articles have been published where she acts as the author of the finds, two large biographical works dedicated to Mary, and last year a full-length biopic starring Kate Winslet and Saoirse Ronan. True, Anning was portrayed as a lesbian there, in the "best traditions", for which there is no historical evidence. But a letter has survived, where she notes the attractiveness of the husband of the geologist Charlotte Murchison, her friend who in the film was presented as Anning's mistress.
In 2015, at the Doncaster Museum, according to a BBC report, paleontologist Dean Lomax, a visiting scientist from the University of Manchester, re-discovered an ichthyosaur in the museum's collection, a new species not previously described. Lomax named it Ichthyosaurus anningae after Mary Anning.
Original material in English