The fossil-collector who made ‘extinction’ a scientific concept

‘She sells sea shells on the sea shore, the shells she sells are sea shells...’ is probably a tongue-twister you remember from your school days, but it is unlikely that you would have learnt of the remarkable woman, often referred to as the fossil hunter, who inspired it. Generally, histories of science are written almost entirely by, for, and about men, so it is not surprising that it is only in the last decade that the world has woken up to the scientific contributions made by Mary Anning (1799-1847), a pioneering palaeontologist and fossil collector.

Anning was born in 1799 in Lyme Regis, in the southwest of England, now a part of what is known as the Jurassic Coast. While Mary was growing up, George III was king, the British were at war with Napoleon, and Jane Austen had written Sense and Sensibility. The Annings were religious dissenters -- Protestants who had broken away from the Church of England -- and extremely poor. Only Mary and her older brother, Joseph, survived to adulthood out of a family of 10 children. Richard, Mary’s father, was a carpenter and amateur fossil collector. Mary had an uncanny gift for discovering fossils and was her father’s fossil-collecting help by the age of five or six, and Richard taught his daughter how to find and clean fossils they found on the beach, and later displayed and sold from his shop. Mary, like many other girls in Lyme Regis at the time, received little formal education. She could, however, read and taught herself geology and anatomy. Richard died suddenly of tuberculosis in 1810, and her mother encouraged Mary to continue selling her fossil finds to help pay off the family’s debts.

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Mary Anning was only 12 when she discovered the first dinosaur skeleton, of an ichthyosaur. Until Mary’s amazing discovery, it was widely assumed that animals did not go extinct. She went on to discover numerous other significant fossils, including the first plesiosaur and the first complete skeleton of the winged reptile Dimorphodon macronyx. She piqued the curiosity of fossil collectors and, eventually, the scientific community. Once word of the fossils reached academia, it became impossible to deny the truth. Mary’s unusual discoveries aided in the development of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, which was laid out in his book, On the Origin of Species. Mary’s fossilised creatures were used by Darwin as irrefutable proof that life in the past was not like life in the present.

While Anning’s discoveries made news in the local newspapers, it was the names of the established naturalists who used her discoveries in the halls of the Geological Society that became associated with them. Although her fossils helped disprove the popular belief that Earth and all its inhabitants were created by God in six days, paving the way for Charles Darwin’s great synthesis in 1859, Anning was not mentioned in key publications or lectures. With chauvinistic regularity over the years, her male colleagues failed to acknowledge her publicly -- even when they reported her findings. Women had no place in the mainstream of science and its path to new discoveries during Anning’s time, and for a long time after. Despite all these seemingly insurmountable constraints, Anning made significant contributions.

Anning was more than just a fossil collector; she was a scientist. She cleaned and reconstructed her own fossil finds. She devoured scientific articles, meticulously copying the entire text and figures. She had animated discussions with the men who wanted her expertise and samples. On her kitchen table, she dissected living sea creatures to better understand the anatomy of their long-dead counterparts. Together with William Buckland, minister and geologist, she even conducted research, hypothesising that the rock-like bodies she frequently discovered within the skeletons she excavated -- coprolites -- were hardened faeces. She reconstituted coprolites in her workshop and deduced what the animals had been eating.

Tracy Chevalier’s Remarkable Creatures is a fascinating fictionalised biography of Mary Anning. Giant marine reptiles are not the only remarkable creatures in the book. Chevalier shines a warm light on a remarkable woman who was responsible for several male careers and, ultimately (in part and indirectly), Darwin’s insights. Anning’s life story is one of defying conventions, notably those of piety. Apart from God, the conventions broken by Mary Anning, simply by being who she was and what she achieved, are the more rigid ones of class and gender.

Anning died unsung, unrecognised, but indisputably the first palaeontologist, who through her scientific discoveries brought the idea of the extinction of a species into mainstream science. She was all of 47 when she died in 1847. It was only in 2010 that Mary Anning was recognised by the Royal Society as one of the 10 most influential women scientists in British history.