Mary Anning: The Fossil Hunter Who Was Never Credited

The specimens that convinced European naturalists that entire kinds of animal had once existed and then vanished were dug out of a crumbling cliff in Dorset by a woman who could not join the society that debated them, could not publish her own findings, and sold what she found because she needed the money.

Mary Anning has become a familiar figure in recent decades, and the popular version tends to flatten her into a plucky child with a hammer. The scientific record shows something else: a self taught anatomist whose identifications were trusted by the leading geologists of the day, and who was consulted precisely because she was better at the work than they were.

Lyme Regis

She was born in 1799 into a poor Congregationalist family in Lyme Regis, on the Dorset coast. As a dissenting family they were excluded from much of English public life, and the chapel school gave her a basic literacy she extended entirely on her own.

The cliffs at Lyme are Jurassic marine deposits, roughly two hundred million years old, and they are actively eroding. Winter storms bring down sections of rock and expose what is inside. This is what makes the location extraordinary and also what made the work lethal: the best time to search is immediately after a landslip, when more rock is about to come down. Her dog Tray, who accompanied her for years, was killed by a fall of cliff while she was working.

Her father Richard collected and sold fossils to tourists as a supplement to his carpentry, and taught the children where to look and how to extract. He died in 1810, leaving the family in debt.

The Ichthyosaur

In 1811, her brother Joseph found a skull, about four feet long, projecting from the cliff. Mary, then twelve, located and excavated the rest of the skeleton over the following months.

Fossil bones and teeth had been found before and were generally explained as the remains of familiar animals: crocodiles, fish, or in earlier centuries the victims of the Flood. This specimen was seventeen feet long, with an enormous eye socket, a long toothed snout, and paddle like limbs. It resembled nothing living.

It was bought for twenty three pounds, passed through several collections, and was described in scientific papers by men who had not found it. The name ichthyosaur, fish lizard, was applied in 1817.

The Plesiosaur and the Cuvier Accusation

The more consequential discovery came in December 1823, when Anning uncovered a nearly complete skeleton of a creature with a small head, an extremely long neck, a broad body and four large paddles.

She recognised it as something new and wrote to her contacts with a careful drawing. When the specimen was described in London, Georges Cuvier in Paris, the most authoritative comparative anatomist in Europe, examined the illustration and declared it a fake. The neck contained around thirty five vertebrae, far more than any known reptile, and he suspected that a fossil skull and body had been fraudulently combined with the neck of a sea serpent or a fish.

This was a dangerous charge. Anning’s living depended entirely on her reputation for honesty, since collectors were buying specimens they could not verify.

The Geological Society examined the fossil directly at a meeting in February 1824. The matrix and the articulation showed no sign of tampering. Cuvier, on receiving a fuller account, withdrew the accusation and accepted the animal as genuine. The plesiosaur stood, and after this episode Anning’s identifications were treated with considerable respect by the very people who could not admit her to their meetings.

What Else She Found

Her subsequent discoveries include:

• A second, more complete plesiosaur in 1830, sold for two hundred pounds
• The first pterosaur found outside Germany, in 1828, later named Dimorphodon. A flying reptile was a considerable novelty in England
• Squaloraja, a fossil fish with features intermediate between sharks and rays
• Numerous ichthyosaur specimens, including species distinguished by skull proportions that she identified herself

Two of her observations were subtler and mattered more to how fossils were interpreted.

She noticed that certain conical stones, then called bezoar stones, were regularly found in the abdominal region of ichthyosaur skeletons, and that when broken open they contained fish bones and scales. She concluded that they were fossilised faeces. William Buckland published the interpretation in 1829, naming them coprolites and crediting her. Fossil dung turned out to be an unusually direct source of evidence about what extinct animals ate.

She also identified fossilised ink sacs in belemnites and showed that the contents could still be ground and used as ink, which was taken as striking evidence of the fidelity of fossil preservation.

The Problem of Credit

Anning could not become a member of the Geological Society of London. Women were not admitted until 1904. She published almost nothing under her own name, the single exception being a short letter to a magazine.

The scientific papers describing her discoveries were written by men who had bought the specimens, and the practice regarding acknowledgement varied. Buckland, Henry De la Beche and William Conybeare knew her well, visited her regularly, and consulted her on anatomy. Others took the fossils and did not mention the source.

Her own view is recorded in a letter, where she wrote that the world had used her ill and that she feared it had made her suspicious of everyone. Another visitor recorded her remark that the men of learning had sucked her brains, and made a great deal by publishing works of which she had furnished the contents, while she got nothing.

Some support did arrive. A collector, Thomas Birch, was so troubled by her poverty that in 1820 he auctioned his own collection and gave her the proceeds. In 1838 the British Association and later the government granted her a modest annual pension, arranged largely by Buckland. De la Beche produced a lithograph, Duria Antiquior, showing the Dorset seas as they might have looked, and sold prints for her benefit. It is one of the first pieces of palaeoart, and it was based on her finds.

She died of breast cancer in 1847, aged forty seven. De la Beche, by then president of the Geological Society, read a eulogy to her at the society’s annual meeting, the only such tribute given to a person who was not and could not be a member.

Why the Fossils Mattered

The scientific stakes were larger than the specimens themselves. In the early nineteenth century, the idea that species could become extinct was still contested. Extinction implied that the created order was not permanent, which had uncomfortable theological implications, and various naturalists preferred to assume that unfamiliar creatures were still alive somewhere unexplored. The naming system the fossils had to be fitted into was the one Linnaeus had built, which made no provision for a species that no longer exists.

Complete skeletons of enormous marine reptiles, found in rock formations far from any modern sea, made that position untenable. These animals were not living anywhere. They had existed, in numbers, and they were gone.

Cuvier built his catastrophist geology on such evidence, arguing for a series of revolutions that swept away earlier faunas. Charles Lyell argued instead for gradual change over immense periods, and it was Lyell’s Principles of Geology that Darwin took with him on the Beagle and read as he went.

The deep time that natural selection requires is not an abstraction. It was established by material dug out of specific cliffs by specific people, and a significant share of the English evidence came from one stretch of the Dorset coast and one collector.

The Portrait

The one contemporary image of Anning, painted around 1842, shows her in a bonnet and heavy coat on the shore, a basket on her arm and a rock hammer in her hand, pointing at something on the ground while her dog lies beside her. It hangs in the Natural History Museum.

It is a working portrait rather than a formal one, and it stands out among scientific images of the period for exactly that reason. Who gets painted, in what setting, holding which instrument, is one of the ways a discipline decides who belongs to it, and that question runs throughout Portraying Science. The visual conventions of nineteenth century scientific illustration were being worked out in the same decades in which her specimens were being drawn for publication under other people’s names.

The Record

Anning found, prepared, and correctly identified some of the most important fossil specimens of the nineteenth century, in dangerous conditions, without training, funding, or the possibility of professional recognition. The animals she pulled out of Lyme Regis are in the Natural History Museum in London, and the arguments they settled are the foundation of palaeontology.

The Royal Society, in 2010, placed her among the ten British women who have most influenced the history of science. It was a hundred and sixty three years late.