Mary Anning was an English fossil collector, dealer, and palaeontologist. She became known around the world for finds she made in Jurassic marine fossil beds in the cliffs along the English Channel at Lyme Regis in Dorset. Her discoveries included the first correctly identified ichthyosaur skeleton; the first two nearly complete plesiosaur skeletons; and fish fossils. Anning’s observations played a key role in the discovery that coprolites, known as bezoar stones, were fossilised faeces.
About Mary Anning in brief
Mary Anning was an English fossil collector, dealer, and palaeontologist. She became known around the world for finds she made in Jurassic marine fossil beds in the cliffs along the English Channel at Lyme Regis in Dorset. Her discoveries included the first correctly identified ichthyosaur skeleton; the first two nearly complete plesiosaur skeletons; and fish fossils. Anning’s observations played a key role in the discovery that coprolites, known as bezoar stones at the time, were fossilised faeces. As a Dissenter and a woman, she was not able to fully participate in the scientific community of 19th-century Britain, who were mostly Anglican gentlemen. In 2010, 163 years after her death, the Royal Society included Anning in a list of the ten British women who have most influenced the history of science. Her story was the inspiration for the 1908 tongue-twister ‘She sells seashells on the seashore’ by Terry Sullivan. After her death in 1847, Anning’s unusual life story attracted increasing interest. Anning became well known in geological circles in Britain, Europe, and America, and was consulted on issues of anatomy as well as about collecting fossils. She was not eligible to join the Geological Society of London and she did not always receive full credit for her scientific contributions. Her family was poor, and her father, a cabinetmaker, died when she was eleven.
Her oldest child, then four years old, died after her clothes caught fire, possibly while adding wood shavings to the fire. More than a year later she was named after her sister Mary after she was five months old. Only two of her children survived to adulthood, but none of them were born more than two or three years old. In December 1798, the child, Mr R, of Lyme, was left by the mother for five minutes in a room where there were some shavments… and she was so dreadfully burnt as to cause her death. She was followed by another daughter, who died almost at once; Joseph in 1796; and another son in 1798. The child, also Mary, was born in 1794. Her father, Richard Anning, was a cabinetmakers and carpenter who supplemented his income by mining the coastal cliff-side fossil beds near the town, and selling his finds to tourists. The only scientific writing of hers published in her lifetime appeared in the Magazine of Natural History in 1839, an extract from a letter that Anning had written to the magazine’s editor questioning one of its claims. The family lived so near to the sea that the same storms that swept along the cliffs to reveal the fossils sometimes flooded the Annings’ home, on one occasion forcing them to crawl out of an upstairs bedroom window to avoid being drowned. Shelley Emling writes that the family lived in a house built on the town’s bridge.
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This page is based on the article Mary Anning published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 02, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
