Fossils, Storms and a Girl from Lyme Regis: The Story of Mary Anning

Source written for Revision Library (original, copyright-free).

On a stormy evening in August 1800, lightning struck a group of women sheltering beneath a tree in Lyme Regis, Dorset. Three of them died instantly. The fourth, a baby girl not yet a year old, was carried into a nearby cottage apparently lifeless and was revived in a warm bath. That baby was Mary Anning. Neighbours later swapped stories about the girl struck by lightning who grew up sharp-eyed and endlessly curious, though nobody can say for certain whether the storm had anything to do with it. What is certain is that the grey, crumbling cliffs above the town where Mary grew up would turn her into one of the most remarkable scientists Britain has ever produced, a woman whose discoveries changed how people understood the ancient history of the Earth.

A childhood on the cliffs

Mary was born on 21/05/1799, the third of ten children, though only she and her older brother Joseph survived beyond infancy. Her father, Richard, was a cabinetmaker who earned extra money selling fossils and shells to the tourists who visited Lyme Regis for its sea air. He would take Mary and Joseph along the beach beneath the cliffs, teaching them to spot the curled shells of ammonites and the bullet-shaped fossils known locally as 'thunderbolts', scattered among the loose rock left behind by landslips.

When Richard died in 1810, deep in debt after a long illness, the family had little choice but to continue the fossil-hunting trade to survive. Mary was only eleven years old. Searching the beach was dangerous work: the same landslips that uncovered new fossils could also bury an unwary collector beneath tonnes of rock and clay, especially after heavy winter rain.

The sea dragon of Lyme Regis

In 1811, when Mary was twelve, Joseph spotted a strange skull poking out of a cliff face, its jaws lined with pointed teeth and its eye sockets the size of saucers. Over the following months, Mary carefully dug out the rest of the skeleton herself, working with hammers and chisels until she had freed a complete animal more than five metres long.

Nobody had ever seen anything like it. Some people thought it might be a crocodile; others suspected the fossil was a hoax, stitched together from several different animals. It was eventually recognised as an ichthyosaur, an extinct marine reptile that had swum in the seas above Britain around 200 million years earlier, long before the dinosaurs most people had heard of. A wealthy local landowner bought the skeleton, and it was later put on display in London, launching Mary's reputation among scientists and collectors.

Monsters from the deep

Mary went on to make even more astonishing discoveries. In 1823, she uncovered the first nearly complete skeleton of a plesiosaur, a long-necked marine reptile so strange that the leading French scientist Georges Cuvier initially suspected it was a fake, its neck impossibly long to belong to any real animal. Once he had studied detailed drawings of the skeleton, Cuvier changed his mind and declared the find genuine, and the Geological Society of London held a special meeting to discuss it.

Five years later, in 1828, Mary found the skeleton of a pterosaur, a flying reptile with thin, papery wings and the first such fossil ever discovered outside Germany. Each discovery added another piece to a puzzle scientists were only just beginning to understand: that the Earth was far older than anyone had previously imagined, and that it had once been home to animals unlike anything alive today.

Admired, but not admitted

Despite her skill, Mary's achievements were rarely fully recognised in her own lifetime. She taught herself geology and anatomy by reading scientific papers, dissecting fish and cuttlefish to understand the animals she excavated, and corresponding regularly with the leading geologists of her day. Yet the Geological Society of London did not allow women to become members, or even to attend its meetings, until 1919, long after Mary had died. Many of the scientists who studied and named her fossils published papers describing her finds without mentioning her name at all.

Money was a constant worry. Fossil hunting brought in an unreliable income, and a bank collapse in 1835 wiped out most of Mary's savings, leaving her with little to fall back on. In 1838, recognising how much science owed her, a group of leading geologists successfully arranged for Mary to receive a small annual payment from the British Association, easing her financial hardship for the rest of her life.

A statue on the same day

Mary Anning died of breast cancer on 09/03/1847, aged just forty-seven. Unusually for a woman who had never been allowed to join the Society, the Geological Society of London published a respectful obituary in her honour, praising the discoveries that had helped establish the science of palaeontology.

Recognition continued to grow long after her death. In 2010, the Royal Society named Mary Anning one of the ten most influential British women in the history of science. In 2022, following a campaign started by a schoolgirl named Evie Swire, a bronze statue of Mary Anning was unveiled on the seafront at Lyme Regis on 21/05/2022, exactly two hundred and twenty-three years after her birth. 'Every fossil in our museum tells part of her story,' says Dr Amara Osei, a curator at the Lyme Regis Museum. 'Mary Anning didn't just find monsters in the cliffs. She helped Britain understand that the whole planet has a much longer, stranger history than anyone before her had realised.'