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Mary Anning (May 21, 1799 – March 9, 1847) was an early British fossil collector and paleontologist.
[edit] Early lifeBorn in the coastal southern English town of Lyme Regis in Dorset,[1] Mary Anning was marked out for an unusual life at the age of 15 months when in 1800 a lightning strike in the village caught four people in the open. Three died but Mary survived. Mary's father, Richard, was a cabinet maker who supplemented his income by mining the coastal cliff-side fossil beds near Lyme Regis, and selling his finds to tourists. Richard Anning moved to Lyme from Colyton in Devon. He married Mary Moore on 8 August 1793 in Blandford. Returning to Lyme, the couple lived in a house built on the town’s bridge, and attended the local Congregational Church, where their children were baptized. Soon after their marriage a daughter Mary was born. She was followed by a second daughter, Martha, who died almost at once, then by a son Joseph, in 1796. In 1798 a second son, Henry, died in infancy and the eldest child, Mary, was burned to death, either sitting too close to the fire, or falling into it. When another daughter was born the following May, she was given the name of her dead sister, Mary. At least four more children followed: Henry, 1801; Percival, 1803; Elizabeth, 1804; and Richard, 1809. All died within a couple of years of birth, leaving only two surviving children, Joseph and Mary, when their father Richard died in 1810 at age 44. When he died of tuberculosis the Anning family was left without support. Mary and her brother Joseph began collecting fossils full-time in an effort to earn some income. [edit] CareerFossil collecting was in vogue in the late 18th century and early 19th century, at first as a pastime akin to stamp collecting but gradually transforming into a science as the importance of fossils to geology and biology became understood. Anning catered to the commercial side of the field, selling her finds. She soon forged relationships within the scientific community, whose passion for fossils grew to be a major source of income for her.    One of Anning's first discoveries was made shortly after her father's death when she was just twelve. She found the first complete skeleton of an ichthyosaur ever discovered, though ichthyosaur fossil fragments had been found in Wales as early as 1699. Her brother had discovered the skull of what appeared to be a large crocodile a year earlier. The rest of the skeleton was not to be found at first, but Mary located it after a storm scoured away a portion of the cliff containing it. It was an important find, and was soon described in the Transactions of the Royal Society. She went on to find two other distinct species of ichthyosaur. As her reputation grew, Mary came to the attention of Thomas Birch, a wealthy fossil collector. Disturbed by the poverty of the Anning family, Birch arranged for the sale of his own fossil collection, the proceeds of which (some £400) were given to the Annings. Put on a sure (if somewhat austere) financial footing for the first time in a decade, Mary carried on with her fossil collecting even after her brother gained employment as an upholsterer. Her next major discovery was a skeleton of a plesiosaur in 1821, the first of its kind to be found. The fossil was subsequently described by William Conybeare as Plesiosaurus dolichodeirus and is the type specimen (holotype) of the species, which itself is the type species of the genus, and in 1823 discovered a second even more complete (the first one had been missing the skull) plesiosaur skeleton. When Conybeare presented his findings on plesiosaurs to a meeting of the Geological Society in 1824 he failed to mention Anning by name even though she had collected both the skeletons he described and he used her sketch of the second skeleton in the presentation.[2] Conybeare's presentation followed the resolution of a controversy over the legitimacy of one of the fossils. The extremely long neck of the plesiosaur with its unprecedented 35 neck vertebrae had raised the suspicions of the eminent French anatomist Georges Cuvier when he reviewed Anning's drawings of the second skeleton, and he wrote to Conybeare suggesting the possibility the the find was a fake produced by combining fossil bones from different kinds of animals. Fraud was far from unknown among early 19th century fossil collectors, and if the controversy had not been resolved promptly the accusation could have seriously damaged Anning's ability to sell fossils to other geologists. Cuvier's accusation had resulted in a special meeting of the Geological Society earlier in 1824, which after some debate had concluded the skeleton was legitimate. Cuvier later admitted he had acted in haste and made a mistake.[3] She found an 'unrivalled specimen' of Dapedium politum, a ray-finned fish, as described in 1828. She discovered an important fossil of a pterosaur, a Pterodactylus macronyx (later renamed by Richard Owen Dimorphodon macronyx), the first found outside Germany and thought to be the first complete skeleton. Those were the three finds that left her mark in history, but she continued collecting for the remainder of her life, making numerous other contributions to early paleontology. It was Anning who noticed that oddly shaped fossils then known as "bezoar stones" were sometimes found in the abdominal region of ichthyosaur skeletons. She also noted that if such stones were broken open they often contained fossilized fish bones and scales as well as sometimes bones from small icthyosaurs. It was these observations by Anning that lead the geologist William Buckland to propose in 1829 that the stones were fossilized feces and name them Coprolites. In contrast with what had happened with the plesiosaur skeletons a few years earlier, when Buckland presented his findings on coprolites to the Geological Society he mentioned Anning by name and praised her skill and industry in helping resolve the mystery.[4] By 1830 she was having financial difficulties again, and the geologist Henry De la Beche assisted her by having a lithographic print made from his watercolor painting Duria Antiquior of life in prehistoric Dorset, largely based on fossils she had found, and donating the proceeds from the sales of the print to her. This became the first such scene from deep time to be widely circulated.[5] In her late thirties she was granted an annuity by the British Association for the Advancement of Science in return for her efforts. Anning died at the age of 47, of breast cancer. A few months earlier she had been made an honorary member of the Geological Society of London despite, as a woman, being ineligible for regular membership. [edit] Impact  Taken all together, Mary Anning's discoveries became key pieces of evidence for extinction. Until her time it was widely believed that animals did not become extinct; any oddities found were explained away as still living somewhere in an unexplored region of the earth. The bizarre nature of the fossils found by Anning struck a heavy blow against this argument, and set the stage for real understanding of life in earlier geologic ages For a time after her death, Mary dropped into obscurity but, in recent decades, she has been rediscovered. After her death, a eulogy was read at the Geological Society, 'some members' of which subsequently contributed to a stained-glass window to her memory, in the parish church of St Michael the Archangel. The inscription reads: "This window is sacred to the memory of Mary Anning of this parish, who died 9 March AD 1847 and is erected by the vicar and some members of the Geological Society of London in commemoration of her usefulness in furthering the science of geology, as also of her benevolence of heart and integrity of life." (It depicts the corporal works of mercy, i.e. feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, clothing the naked, sheltering the homeless, visiting prisoners and visiting the sick.) Mary Anning is believed to be the source of the old tongue-twister, "She sells sea shells by the sea shore." [6] In 2005, a Mary Anning 'facsimile' was created at the Natural History Museum as one of a number of notable gallery characters to patrol its displays. She is thus among other luminaries including Carl Linnaeus, Dorothea Bate, and William Smith.[7] Writer John Fowles in The French Lieutenant's Woman (Ch. 8) notes: "One of the meanest disgraces of British palaeontology is that though many scientists of the day gratefully used her finds to establish their own reputation, not one native type bears the name anningii". [edit] Notes
[edit] Bibliography
[edit] See also
[edit] Further reading
[edit] External links
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