A CENTURY OF PROGRESS 117
Anning found a 4 ft- (1.2 m-) long
skull with a curiously elongated
toothed beak. His sister Mary
found the rest of the skeleton,
which they sold for about $37 (£23).
Exhibited in London, this was the
first entire skeleton of an extinct
“monster of the abyss” and
attracted a great deal of popular
attention. It was identified as an
extinct marine reptile and named
an ichthyosaur, meaning “fish-lizard.”
The Anning family went on to
find more ichthyosaurs and the
first complete specimen of another
marine reptile, the plesiosaur,
in addition to the first British
specimen of a flying reptile, new
fossil fish, and shellfish. Among the
fish they found were cephalopods
known as belemnites, some with
the ink-sac preserved. The family,
and especially Mary, had a talent
for fossil hunting. Although poor,
Mary was literate and taught
herself geology and anatomy, which
made her a far more effective fossil
hunter. As Lady Harriet Sylvester
observed in 1824, Mary Anning
was “so thoroughly acquainted
with the science that the moment
she finds any bones she knows to
what tribe they belong.” She
became an authority on many
kinds of fossils, especially
coprolites—fossilized dung.
The picture of life in ancient
Dorset revealed by Anning’s fossils
was one of a tropical coast where
a wide variety of now-extinct
animals thrived. In 1854, Anning’s
fossils provided models for the first
life-size reconstruction of an
ichthyosaur, made for London’s
Crystal Palace park by the sculptor
Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins and
the paleontologist Richard Owen. It
was Owen who coined the word
“dinosaur,” but Anning who had
provided the first glimpse of the
richness of Jurassic life. ■See also: Carl Linnaeus 74–75 ■ Charles Darwin 142–49 ■
Thomas Henry Huxley 172–73
Mary Anning
Several biographies and
novels have been written
about the life of Mary Anning,
a self-taught fossil collector.
She was one of two surviving
children out of 10 born into an
impoverished Dorset family of
religious dissenters who lived
in the coastal village of Lyme
Regis. The family eked out a
precarious living collecting
fossils for sale to the growing
numbers of tourists. However,
it was Mary who found and
sold their most significant
finds—fossils of Jurassic
reptiles that lived 201–145
million years ago.
Due to a combination of
her gender, humble social
standing, and religious
unorthodoxy, Anning received
little formal recognition of her
work in her lifetime, and she
noted in a letter, “The world
has used me unkindly, I fear
it has made me suspicious of
everyone.” However, she was
widely known in geological
circles and various scientists
sought out her expertise.
When her health failed,
Anning was provided with a
small annual pension of about
$40 (£25) in recognition of her
contribution to science. She
died of breast cancer at 47.In 1830, Henry De la Beche
painted this reconstruction of life in
the Jurassic seas around Dorset based
on Anning’s fossil discoveries.