Web Bit 15-1: Mary Anning, The First Woman Paleontologist
By Mary Miller
In the world of fossil hunting, larger than life characters usually chew up the scenery. A handful of flamboyant paleontologists, all men, dominate. Sir Richard Owen, the 19th-century English naturalist who gave dinosaurs their name ("terrible lizard" though they are not technically lizards and most are not terrible), was a darling of the British noble class. In 1853, he designed the world's first exhibition devoted to dinosaurs, housed in London's Crystal Palace.
Across the Atlantic, Edward Cope and Othniel Marsh quite literally battled over dinosaur bones in the badlands of the American west. Their exploits were splashed across the front pages of newspapers in the late-1800s in a scientific conflict that was dubbed "The Bone Wars." Present-day Jack Horner, ornery college dropout and curator at the Museum of the Rockies, is famous for his discoveries that dinosaurs were good mothers. He was also a model for the paleontologist in the movie Jurassic Park.
These legendary personalities are the headliners, but if you dig beneath the surface some fascinating supporting characters emerge. One such character was Mary Anning, a 19th-century fossil collector whose prowess helped establish England as a leader in paleontological research and discovery.
Mary Anning learned to spot old bones along the crumbling sea cliffs of Lyme Regis in southern Britain when she was a little girl. Her father, a cabinetmaker who supplemented the meager family income by collecting and selling fossils to tourists, soon realized his daughter had a keen eye and a talent for collecting and mounting specimens.
Her father died in 1820 when Mary was 11, but she continued her prospecting and eventually established a fossil business to support the family. When she was 12, she and her brother discovered the first Ichthyosaur ("fish lizard"), a dolphin-shaped marine reptile. She also found Britain's first Pterodactyl in 1828 in southern England and collected fossil fish, sharks, and mollusks throughout her career.
Her most important discovery was the Plesiosaur, also discovered in 1828 in Lyme. This Loch Ness-like creature was so improbable that the great French anatomist Cuvier scoffed at the drawings when he first saw them. But he later examined the bones and confirmed their validity, helping establish Mary Anning as one of the most important fossil researchers of her day.
She was not only a prolific collector, Anning also read the literature widely and could identify specimens and discuss anatomy and paleontology with the country's leading scientists, many of whom admired her collecting skills and intelligence. Still, that wasn't enough to secure her place in the scientific world. As a working class woman in Victorian England, Anning had no social status and lacked a formal education. Some of her male contemporaries couldn't believe that she possessed the specialized knowledge and skills needed to make such significant contributions to science.
Most of her finds were never given proper credit, though she sold fossils to many scientists, museums, and private collectors. Paleontologists have always been ambivalent, if not hostile, towards commercial collectors. Some paleontologists feel that profit-seeking undermines the scientific pursuit of knowledge and worry that commercial collectors might not document their findings as carefully or honestly as would an institutional scientist. Furthermore, many museums only acknowledge donated specimens or those discovered by their own staff. For those reasons, no one knows how many fossils Anning collected, though she's credited with helping establish the foundations of modern paleontology.
In 1856, when Mary Anning died at age 47 from breast cancer, she was given an obituary in the Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society. This British organization wouldn't begin admitting women for another 50 years, but considered her work important enough to acknowledge at the time of her death.
Mary Anning quickly sank into historical obscurity, but recent years have seen a revival of interest. In 1999, a bicentennial celebration was held in her hometown of Lyme Regis to honor the "first woman paleontologist." Luminaries such as author and evolutionary theorist Stephen Jay Gould have written about her. Mary Anning has also been the subject of numerous children's books, articles, and historical texts.
Two of Anning's most important fossil discoveries are displayed along with her portrait in the British Museum of Natural History, and Dorchester's Dinosaur Museum has opened a new gallery dedicated to her. You can even buy a copy of the Mary Anning specimen of Ichthyosaurus communis from 1-800-fossils. Thankfully, it's never too late to discover an old legend.