May 21, 1799 – Birth of Mary Anning, Pioneering Paleontologist

Mary Anning was born in 1799 in Lyme Regis, on the southern shores of Great Britain. Mary’s father Richard collected fossils from the cliffs at Lyme Regis to sell, as the area was (and still is) known for its rich deposits from the Jurassic period.

Mary Anning

By the time she was five or six, Mary and her brother Joseph were accompanying her father on his fossil-collecting trips. Richard taught them how to look for and clean the fossils they found on the beach, and often displayed and sold them from his shop.

Richard died suddenly when Mary was 11, and Joseph had to find a career to help support the family. Mary’s mother encouraged Mary to keep finding fossils to add to their income.

Joseph had previously found a fossilized skull, and when Mary was 12, she dug out its whole skeleton. The mysterious specimen was studied and debated for years. It was eventually named Ichthyosaurus, or ‘fish lizard’ – though we now know it was neither fish nor lizard, but a marine reptile. It lived around 200 million years ago.

But perhaps most remarkably, Mary discovered that the skeletons she found were full of dark, lumpy pebbles. She eventually proclaimed these these stones, known as bezoars, were actually fossilized feces. Mary’s discovery helped scholars learn more about what dinosaurs ate.

She also researched long, thin, cone-shaped fossils that turned out to contain ink when water was added, hypothesizing that ancient aquatic creatures squirted ink to hide themselves from hungry predators.

In 1823 when Mary was 24, she was the first to discover the complete skeleton of a plesiosaurus, a prehistoric flying reptile.

Mary Anning’s sketch of her first plesiosaur via UK Natural History Museum

Even with all of this, Mary couldn’t join the Geological Society of London, because women weren’t allowed. She couldn’t attend lectures or take university classes because she was a woman. But when geologists, scientists, and scholars had questions about the Earth’s past, they went to Mary’s cottage. In 1844, even King Frederick Augustus II of Saxony visited Mary in her shop.

Male geologists did publish scientific descriptions of fossils Mary found, but neglected to mention her name. In a book about fossilists, The Dragon Seekers, Christopher McGowan reports that Anna Pinney, a young woman who sometimes accompanied Anning 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.” [This book is available online here.]

The majority of Mary’s finds ended up in museums and personal collections, without credit being given to her as the discoverer of the fossils, needless to add.

Slowly, however, Mary’s achievements have been uncovered and acknowledged. In 2010, the Royal Society of London named Marry Anning as one of the ten most influential British women of science.

Detailed sketch by Mary Anning, via UK Natural History Museum