Mary Anning, a pioneering British paleontologist and fossil collector, was born on this day in 1799 in Lyme Regis, Dorset. Anning spent her life working at the seaside cliffs of Dorset, where she financially supported herself by excavating, collecting, and selling the fossils she gathered there. Her work was commemorated in Terry Sullivan’s 1908 tongue twister, “She sells sea shells by the sea shore.”
Anning made numerous, important contributions to the study of Jurassic marine life and to the developing body of scholarly knowledge regarding the history of the earth, prehistoric life, and species extinction. Her best known discoveries include the first correctly identified ichthyosaur, one of the most complete plesiosaur skeletons, and the first pterosaur specimen found outside of Germany. Her scientific observations also led to the discovery that coprolites are fossilized feces and provide crucial data regarding ancient ecosystems.
During her lifetime, Anning never got the professional recognition that she deserved. Despite her many discoveries, she was relegated to the margins of the British scientific community because of her gender and working class background. Prevailing sexist attitudes kept her out of the Geological Society of London, an organization that benefited greatly from her hard work but didn’t admit women until 1904. Moreover, Anning did not always receive credit for her scientific contributions; male scholars lecturing about the fossils she found often neglected to mention her at all. At one point, she wrote, “The world has used me so unkindly, I fear it has made me suspicious of everyone.”
This unkindness touched her personal life as well. During the last several years of her life, while suffering from the breast cancer that would ultimately kill her, Anning slowed her work pace as she took laudanum to ease her physical pain. The townspeople of Lyme Regis, interpreting the effects of her pain medication as alcohol addiction, spread rumors that she had a drinking problem.
Anning died on March 9, 1847 at age 47, and it wasn’t until after her death that her many contributions to paleontology and geology were fully and officially recognized. Henry De la Beche, president of the Geological Society of London, wrote a eulogy for her that he read to a meeting of the society and subsequently published in its quarterly proceedings. It was the first such eulogy given for a woman by the society.
In 1865, Charles Dickens wrote admiringly of Anning’s accomplishments and sympathetically about her hardships in his article, “Mary Anning, the Fossil Finder,” which he published in his literary magazine All the Year Round. Dickens’ feelings about his subject were neatly encapsulated in the article’s last sentence: “The carpenter’s daughter has won a name for herself, and has deserved to win it.”
This new appreciation of Anning and her work gathered momentum in the 20th century, beginning with H. A. Forde and his 1925 book, The Heroine of Lyme Regis: The Story of Mary Anning the Celebrated Geologist. Far more recently, Shelley Emling published her 2009 biography of Anning, The Fossil Hunter: Dinosaurs, Evolution, and the Woman whose Discoveries Changed the World.
Though Mary Anning’s life was difficult, she is now known as one of the leading scholars of the discipline of paleontology during its formative years.