'She sells sea shells by the sea shore.'
Many have heard this Old English rhyme, but
few know the true story of the woman who inspired it
Her name was Mary Anning.
And she did much more than sell sea shells
She discovered some of the very first dinosaur fossils
and though she never received proper credit for it
she laid the ground work for the entire field of Paleontology
To say that Mary Anning's life had a rough start would be an understatement
She was named after an older sister,
who had burned to death in fire
Before Mary could walk,
her nurse was struck by a lightning bolt while holding her
The nurse was killed
but baby Mary survived
She bounced back and grew into a lively child who could always be found at her father's side
Scouring the local beach to collect the curious sea shells and so called crocodile teeth
that tourists loved to buy from them
She was barely eight when her father slipped
and fell of off one of the treacherous sea side cliffs
And though he managed to crawl home that day,
the pain racked him of the rest of short life
He died three years later,
leaving his wife and two surviving children with debts to pay
Mary did her best to bring home money by running errands around town
But she still loved to visit the beach the way her father used to,
searching for curiosities
She had just picked up a large sea shell
when a passing tourist,
admiring its beauty,
offered to buy it from Mary
for what amounted to a full week's worth of food for her and her family
In a snap, Mary realised that she could bring back her father's curio selling business
as long as she was willing to risk exploring the same rocky shores that had ultimately claimed his life
She did not hesitate.
She and her older brother returned to their beach hunting ways
and their mother became the manager of the little shop they reopened in their living room.
It was Mary's brother who made the first big find;
a skull, which he believed to be from a crocodile.
But he had no time to investigate further.
He had a real job now. He couldn't just keep hunting for trinkets
Twelve year old Mary made the call
She would find the rest of these bones,
even if she had to spend all of her meager earnings
hiring a group of labourers to help dig them out
Her instinct payed off
Unwittingly,
she managed to unearth
the first complete fossil of an Ichthyosaur
An ancient marine reptile, unlike anything anybody had ever seen
A wealthy collector snatched it up for a price that more than paid off Mary's digging investment
The fossil went on to be displayed in a museum
Where it became an enormous public spectacle
and attracted the attention of the Geological Society of London
The scientific community had just begun to explore the idea that certain species might become extinct
This was a radical thought in a Christian society
that could not conceive of creatures that had been part of God's perfect creation just
dying out
But here was Mary Anning's fossil
Evidence of some creature that no longer swam the seas
And one that was older than anybody could yet imagine
The Geological Society jumped on it
They debated the fossil at length
Arguing about whether it was a fish or
maybe a lizard or some kind of aquatic bird?
The one thing they never discussed was the person who found it
Their society had no place for woman
Especially not a poor uneducated woman who seemed to have merely made a lucky find
Nevertheless, outside the formal halls of the society
educated geologists
began to migrate to the source of this great find
To Mary in her tiny sea side town
They found a young woman who had become an expert at finding fossils or shells and carefully excavating them
As always she sold her finds to support her family
and the collectors or geologists who bought them quickly turned around to claim credit for the finds
But while Mary would grow to resent these men who, as she put it, sucked her brains
She still befriended many of them and profited from their knowledge
She was determined to not just be some lucky bumpkin who found a fossil by pure chance
She read and reread every book she could get from the hand full of wealthy people who supported her eager quest to learn
She even collected dead creatures from the beach
and dissected them on her kitchen table
Learning everything she could about their anatomy
Though self-taught, Mary became an expert
who could, and did argue successfully with the most brilliant scholars of the age
And her fossil finds continued
In 1823, she excavated a Plesiosaurus
By then, enough Plesiosaurus bones
had been found elsewhere that others had already speculated about its existence
But nobody had ever found a specimen as complete as Mary Anning's
Confronted with the bizarre reality of this long necked,
fat bodied,
flippered sea monster
the worlds leading vertebrate naturalist declared that he believed it to be a fake
The creation of some overactive imagination and
too much plaster of Paris
When closer examination proved that the bones were in fact real
Mary's good name was vindicated
But credit for the discovery still went to somebody else
As more and more ancient fossils came to light
a public craze began to develop around them
And a new branch of science sprang up to study them
Paleontology
Mary, who despite her lack of official credit,
had won herself a reputation across all of Europe for her expertise
was dubbed the Princess of Paleontology
But while other Paleontologists chased after bones,
Mary had begun the greatest hunt of all
The hunt for poop
She had noticed the strange and inscrutable stones that often appeared in the abdomens of the fossils she found
and she theorised that their proud and noble poop had become fossilised glorious rock poop
imprisoned within the cage of time
She convinced one of her friends from the Geological Society to investigate these majestic poops with her
Through forbidden and occult arts, by which I mean chemistry
They managed to restore the grandeur of ancient stone poop
With their powers of science, they turned it into
not stone poop
And thus with poop in hand they strode mightily through the world of science
They had unlocked two crucial mysteries about these ancient creatures
What they ate, and how they became fossils
It would become a corner stone of Paleontology research
that continues to power many new discoveries even today
Mary's friend named these fossil feces coprolites
And rushed to publish a paper about them
Giving her, as you might have already guessed,
zero credit for the discovery
Mary had no time to complain
Even if she had received credit for unraveling the mysteries of coprolite
she couldn't exactly sell poop to her carefully curated network of wealthy collectors
She had to market herself constantly
Writing letters to past clients promising new fossils worthy of a museum
Promises that she knew would appeal to their egos and open their bank accounts
But she simply hadn't found many good fossils lately
But then at last,
the fierce ocean storms that so often threaten her life gave her a gift
They wore down the cliffs enough for Mary to dig out a fossil that even she did not recognise
This was no sea creature
It had wings
She had discovered the second Pterodactyl ever
And the first specimen complete enough to confirm that,
yes, some of these ancient reptiles could fly
Again, this discovery lit a fire in the imagination other paleontologists
who began to see flying reptiles everywhere they looked
The next time Mary found a new fossil, experts rushed to argue that it was another flying reptile
Or at least another sea reptile like the Ichthyosaurus
Mary, who remembered finding a similar skeleton in the ray fish she dissected on her kitchen table
Insisted that, no, this was a fish
Four years later, the experts agreed
Yeah, that was a fish
Mary went on to discover yet another species of Plesiosaur
Bringing her to a total of 5 major discoveries before the age of 30
She also cataloged
countless species of fish, ammonites and other small sea creatures
Unlike her male contemporaries who lived of off cushy stipends from universities and museums
and even the church
Mary had to sell her discoveries to survive
And in doing so she had to give away the credit for her work
Yet for two decades
she ran a successful business that supported her and her mother
Until everything collapsed
The fossil rich shores of her town,
the only place she could ever access as a poor woman who couldn't afford research trips
Eventually ran dry
She could find no more major discoveries
What fossils she did find were repeats of exciting species
and she struggled to sell them in a tough economy that had lost its enthusiasm for such novelties
Then her bank collapsed,
erasing her life savings
Her mother passed away
And finally, Mary was diagnosed with breast cancer at the age of 46
She carried on for two more years
Still hunting for fossils, but found nothing
In the final years of her life,
the men who so often claimed her discoveries as their own
and refused her admission to their exclusive Geological Society of London
came through for her in some small ways
They raised the funds for a small pension that she could life on
And after she died, the Society honored her with a eulogy
and a stained glass window gifted to her church
But it was too little too late
Marry Anning would be remembered not as a paleontologist
whose work paved the way for a completely new understanding of the history of the earth
But as a nameless woman who simply sold sea shells by the seashore