The real Mary Anning, was a Pioneering Woman Of Science.
You might have recently heard of Mary Anning from the the film released in 2020 called, Ammonite.
The film is loosely inspired by the life of British palaeontologist Mary Anning, played
by Kate Winsle, who brought remarkable discoveries to what is now known as the field of paleontology.
Sadly, the film focuses more upon a fictional lesbian relationship than
on Mary Annings life long accomplishments.
But it does give an accurate representation of the hardship of Mary Anning's life.
A life of poverty from beginning to end. And a life of rarely credited accomplishments.
Only in recent years has Mary been given credit for the pioneering contributions
she made to science in the areas of geology,
archeology, paleontology and yes,even Darwins Theory of Evolution.
In 1799, Mary was born to a very low-income family in Lyme Regis, Dorset, England. At
that time, female children were not given a formal education but that didn't stop Mary's actve mind.
She taught herself geology, anatomy, paleontology,
and scientific illustration for her work as a fossil finder with her father.
While struggling to bring money in, her father, a carpenter by trade,
took to fossil collecting on what we now call the Jurassic Coast of England. He brought along Mary,
aged 5, to help him in his hunt. Mary and her brother and father would clean,
polish and sell the fossils to museums as well as to the tourists who visited along the coasts.
Only a year after the death of her father in 1810,
Mary and Joseph found the fossilized skull of an ichthyosaur, or "fish lizard."
Mary's brother went to work as an apprentice leaving Mary on her own to dig out the remaining
17-foot long skeleton which took months of meticulous uncovering work for Mary.
Due to her tenacity and need, she did succeed and sold the fossil for 23 pounds or what would
be approximately 2,200 pounds in today's money. Today, Mary is finally credited for
the skeletal find that now resides at the Natural History Museum in London.
Mary's remarkable discovery occurred at a time when the theory of extinction was
being debated in Georgian England and her finds were key to the
reconstruction of Earth’s past and the development of the theory of evolution.
The next major discovery for Mary came in 1823, when she found a full skeleton of a Plesiosaurus.
A 9-foot swimming reptile species that had never been discovered before.
It is said that this discovery is her most significant scientific find.
And again, Mary's work led her to another important discovery in 1828.
The fossil of a pterosaur (later named a Pterodactyl).
This was the first fossil of it's kind found outside Germany.
In addition to all that, Mary also spearheaded the study of fossilized feces or coprolites.
Througout her scientific life, Mary corresponded with,
provided fossils for, and sometimes hunted with, well-known scientists of the time,
such as William Buckland and Richard Owen (who would coin the word “dinosaur” in 1842).
While Mary, as a woman, was barred from membership in scientific societies
and thereby denied full credit for scientific writings and discoveries , we do know about her
exemplary skills as a paleontologist from the 1824 diary of Lady Harriet Sivester,
who wrote of Mary. ". . . the extraordinary
thing in this young woman is that she has made herself so thoroughly acquainted with the science
that the moment she finds any bones she knows to what tribe they belong. She fixes the bones on
a frame with cement and then makes drawings and has them engraved. . . It is certainly
a wonderful instance of divine favour – that this poor, ignorant girl should be so blessed,
for by reading and application she has arrived to that degree of knowledge as
to be in the habit of writing and talking with professors and other clever men on the subject,
and they all acknowledge that she understands more of the science than anyone else in this kingdom."
Finally in eighteen 38, the British Association for the Advancement of Science and London’s
Geological Society granted Mary an annual income to continue her fossil-finding work.
It was a meager income but it did support Mary and her mother
until Mary's death at the age of 47 in 1847.
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