52 Facts About Mary Anning

Mary Anning was an English fossil collector, dealer, and palaeontologist.

Mary Anning became known internationally for her discoveries in Jurassic marine fossil beds in the cliffs along the English Channel at Lyme Regis in the county of Dorset, Southwest England.

Mary Anning searched for fossils in the area's Blue Lias and Charmouth Mudstone cliffs, particularly during the winter months when landslides exposed new fossils that had to be collected quickly before they were lost to the sea.

Mary Anning's discoveries included the first correctly identified ichthyosaur skeleton when she was twelve years old; the first two nearly complete plesiosaur skeletons; the first pterosaur skeleton located outside Germany; and fish fossils.

Mary Anning's observations played a key role in the discovery that coprolites, known as bezoar stones at the time, were fossilised faeces, and she discovered that belemnite fossils contained fossilised ink sacs like those of modern cephalopods.

However, her friend, geologist Henry De la Beche, who painted Duria Antiquior, the first widely circulated pictorial representation of a scene from prehistoric life derived from fossil reconstructions, based it largely on fossils Mary Anning had found and sold prints of it for her benefit.

Mary Anning became well known in geological circles in Britain, Europe, and America, and was consulted on issues of anatomy as well as fossil collecting.

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 Mary Anning had written to the magazine's editor questioning one of its claims.

Mary Anning was followed by another daughter, who died almost at once; Joseph in 1796; and another son in 1798, who died in infancy.

The high child mortality rate for the Mary Anning family was not unusual.

On 19 August 1800, when Mary Anning was 15 months old, an event occurred that became part of local lore.

Mary Anning's family said she had been a sickly baby before the event, but afterwards she seemed to blossom.

Mary Anning's education was extremely limited, but she was able to attend a Congregationalist Sunday school, where she learned to read and write.

Mary Anning's prized possession was a bound volume of the Dissenters' Theological Magazine and Review, in which the family's pastor, the Reverend James Wheaton, had published two essays, one insisting that God had created the world in six days, the other urging dissenters to study the new science of geology.

At one point, Richard Mary Anning was involved in organising a protest against food shortages.

Mary Anning left the family with debts and no savings, forcing them to apply for poor relief.

The risks of Mary Anning's profession were illustrated when in October 1833 she barely avoided being killed by a landslide that buried her black-and-white terrier, Tray, her constant companion when she went collecting.

Palaeontologist Christopher McGowan examined a copy Mary Anning made of an 1824 paper by William Conybeare on marine reptile fossils and noted that the copy included several pages of her detailed technical illustrations that he was hard-pressed to tell apart from the original.

Mary Anning dissected modern animals including both fish and cuttlefish to gain a better understanding of the anatomy of some of the fossils with which she was working.

In 1826, aged 27, Mary Anning managed to save enough money to purchase a house with a glass store-front window for her shop, Mary Anning's Fossil Depot.

The extract from the letter that the magazine printed was the only writing of Mary Anning's published in the scientific literature during her lifetime.

Hugh Torrens writes that these slights to Mary Anning were part of a larger pattern of ignoring the contributions of working-class people in early 19th-century scientific literature.

Henry De la Beche and Mary Anning became friends as teenagers following his move to Lyme, and he, Mary Anning, and sometimes her brother Joseph, went fossil-hunting together.

De la Beche and Mary Anning kept in touch as he became one of Britain's leading geologists.

Mary Anning assisted Thomas Hawkins with his efforts to collect ichthyosaur fossils at Lyme in the 1830s.

Mary Anning was aware of his penchant to "enhance" the fossils he collected.

The Swiss palaeontologist Louis Agassiz visited Lyme Regis in 1834 and worked with Mary Anning to obtain and study fish fossils found in the region.

Charlotte, who travelled widely and met many prominent geologists through her work with her husband, helped Mary Anning build her network of customers throughout Europe, and she stayed with the Murchisons when she visited London in 1829.

Mary Anning was replaced by the less likeable Ebenezer Smith.

The greater social respectability of the established church, in which some of Mary Anning's gentleman geologist customers such as Buckland, Conybeare, and Sedgwick were ordained clergy, was a factor.

Mary Anning, who was devoutly religious, actively supported her new church as she had her old.

Mary Anning died from breast cancer at the age of 47 on 9 March 1847.

The regard in which Mary Anning was held by the geological community was shown in 1846 when, upon learning of her cancer diagnosis, the Geological Society raised money from its members to help with her expenses and the council of the newly created Dorset County Museum made Mary Anning an honorary member.

An anonymous article about Mary Anning's life was published in February 1865 in Charles Dickens's literary magazine All the Year Round.

The article emphasised the difficulties Mary Anning had overcome, especially the scepticism of her fellow townspeople.

Mary Anning found several other ichthyosaur fossils between 1815 and 1819, including almost complete skeletons of varying sizes.

In 2022, two plaster casts of the first complete ichthyosaur skeleton fossil found by Mary Anning that was destroyed in the bombing of London during the Second World War, were discovered in separate collections.

In 1823, Mary Anning discovered a second, much more complete plesiosaur skeleton, specimen NHMUK OR 22656.

The fact that the plesiosaur's long neck had an unprecedented 35 vertebrae raised the suspicions of the eminent French anatomist Georges Cuvier when he reviewed Mary Anning's drawings of the second skeleton, and he wrote to Conybeare suggesting the possibility that the find was a fake produced by combining fossil bones from different kinds of animals.

Mary Anning discovered yet another important and nearly complete plesiosaur skeleton in 1830.

Mary Anning found what a contemporary newspaper article called an unrivalled specimen of Dapedium politum.

In 1826 Mary Anning discovered what appeared to be a chamber containing dried ink inside a belemnite fossil.

Mary Anning showed it to her friend Elizabeth Philpot who was able to revivify the ink and use it to illustrate some of her own ichthyosaur fossils.

Mary Anning noted how closely the fossilised chambers resembled the ink sacs of modern squid and cuttlefish, which she had dissected to understand the anatomy of fossil cephalopods, and this led William Buckland to publish the conclusion that Jurassic belemnites had used ink for defence just as many modern cephalopods do.

Mary Anning noted that if such stones were broken open they often contained fossilised fish bones and scales, and sometimes bones from small ichthyosaurs.

Mary Anning suspected the stones were fossilised faeces and suggested so to Buckland in 1824.

Forde and his The Heroine of Lyme Regis: The Story of Mary Anning the Celebrated Geologist, a number of writers saw Anning's life as inspirational.

Mary Anning sells seashells on the seashore The shells she sells are seashells, I'm sure So if she sells seashells on the seashore Then I'm sure she sells seashore shells.

Much of the material written about Mary Anning was aimed at children, and tended to focus on her childhood and early career.

Mary Anning has been referenced in several historical novels, most notably in The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles, who was critical of the fact that no British scientist had named a species after her in her lifetime.

In May 2024, a book that once belonged to Mary Anning was returned to the museum in Lyme Regis from Australia on her 225th birthday.

The statue was granted planning permission by Dorset Council for a space overlooking Black Ven, where Mary Anning made many of her finds.