Mary Anning, Princess of Paleontology

Mary Anning started hunting for fossils in Lyme Regis in the early 1800s. Around 1811, she uncovered the complete skeleton of an ichthyosaurus. She made several significant contributions to paleontology, so why didn't she always get credit for her work?

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from house
stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm to bring a chalko reboarding and I'm faired out
and researching. This episode's topic really took me back to
my childhood days digging for artifacts, fossils and the like

(00:24):
in my backyard and small town Alabama. I mean, did
you ever do this, Sarah? Did you look for treasures?
I did? I did, and I don't think I ever
came up with a whole lot more than old clay
plumbing pipe, so I mean, at least that's something. Well,
my friend Katie and I actually had a game that
we made up was really a game, but we called
it archaeologists, and we would go to the trails behind

(00:46):
my house and come back with these big clumps of
dirt and then we would sit on my parents deck
with my dad's tools and like chisel at them and
pretend like we were finding things while we sang songs
from the movie Beaches. Oh wow, Yeah, I must have
been really excited when Drastic Park came out. I was.
I liked I liked the book. I read the book

(01:06):
before it came out, and I was really excited about
that movie. But yeah, but of course in our little
archaeologist game, we never came up with anything, just piles
of dirt, which I'm sure my parents love. But the
subject of today's podcast, Mary Anning, also started hunting for
fossils in her hometown in the early eighteen hundreds at
a very young age. But she made out much better

(01:27):
than most kids. Anning not only found many authentic fossils,
she found entire skeletons of prehistoric creatures, and is often
considered a key player in the development of paleontology as
a science. All of this happened even before the term
dinosaur even existed. She didn't even know exactly what she
was trying to find with these what we're certainly more

(01:49):
than games. So in fact, she's been called quote one
of the most accomplished fossil hunters of her time, and
some scientists even believe her work may have contributed to
the theories of Charles Darwin himself. But Mary Anning wasn't
fossil hunting for the sake of science alone, and she
wasn't just doing it for childhood kicks either. Like like

(02:10):
us to Blena, We're going to take a look today
at what exactly motivated this prolific paleontologist and why if
she's linked to the likes of men like Charles Darwin
and other prominent scientists, her name isn't nearly as well
known as you might expect it to be. First, though,
we need to give you a little bit of background
on where Mary Annie lived, because it certainly gave her

(02:32):
a distinct advantage as a fossil hunter. She was born
and lived her entire life in a town called Lime
Regis on England's Channel coast. In the late eighteenth century.
This became a really fashionable resort area and has been
featured in books including Jane Austen's Persuasion and John fouls
The French Lieutenants Woman. But according to an article by

(02:53):
Michael A. Taylor and U. S. Torrens in Natural History,
way before it became a resort town two years ago,
in fact, Lime Regis, along with the rest of southern Britain,
was submerged under tropical sea near the equator, so animals
that died in those waters often ended up embedded and
preserved in the mud of that submerged land. And that's

(03:15):
why this region, the English Channel coast of southern England,
known as the Jurassic Coast, has been so abundant in
fossils it just seems to have an almost never ending
supply of them. And Lime Regius in particular is surrounded
by cliffs composed of alternating bands of limestone and slate
which are constantly being eroded by the elements, and every

(03:37):
time they are eroded a little bit more they reveal
all kinds of fossilized treasures. And according to Encyclopedia Britannica,
the cliffs date from the late Jurassic to Early Jurassic period,
so about two hundred twenty nine million to one hundred
and seventy six million years ago, so there's plenty of
time to have stored up lots of fossils. So that's

(04:00):
just a basic, not to science snapshot of the area
where Mary Annie was born May one, and she was
one of somewhere around ten kids of a poor cabinet
maker named Richard Anning and his wife Mary Moore, now
the Annie, and which is part of why we don't
exactly know how many kids they had. They had it
pretty rough as far as their kids were concerned, only

(04:23):
two children and that was Mary and her older brother
Joseph managed to survive. All the other children were lost
to illness or accident along the way, and there was
even another child called Mary. Before the Mary we're focusing
on in this episode came around and according to a
two thousand five article in British Heritage are Mary covered

(04:44):
in this podcast had a narrow escape of her own
of a child when she was only about a year old,
She and her nursemaid got caught out in a pretty
bad thunderstorm, and when the nursemaid took Mary and thought
shelter along with a couple of other people underneath a
big tree, the tree got struck by lightning and killed
all the three adults underneath the tree and burned Mary

(05:07):
pretty badly too. When Mary was found, in fact, everyone
thought that she was dead too, but they managed to
revive her, and according to her family, this event really
changed their child somehow. She was considered quote dull before,
but after I mean for a one year old, I'm
not but after this event she became really intelligent and

(05:28):
lively and grew up that way too. So to her family,
it seemed like the lightning had changed the course of
Mary's life, being struck by lightning. And as we mentioned earlier,
around the time that Mary was born, Limeary just started
becoming a hotspot for vacationers and that created a market
for what we're known as local curios or curiosities. Local

(05:49):
townspeople would collect and pedal fossils for cash, and this
included fossil shells which they called lady fingers, and stones
that looked like pieces of backbone, which they called vertebarries. Yum,
sounds like a new cereal, it does. Most people involved
in these sorts of transactions, of course, had no idea
that the items were fossils. Tourists were just mainly buying

(06:11):
them as souvenirs chats kind of exactly. And Mary's father, Richard,
was one of these amateur fossil collectors, and he would
sell these curiosities to tourists and it became a major
source of income for his entire family, and Mary of
course became pretty interested in these curious too. She'd go
along with her father sometimes collecting fossils, collecting shells along

(06:33):
the shores and even climbing around the cliffs looking for things.
And on these outings, Mary learned how to feel out
her fines and carefully remove items that were lodged into
the cliffs. And to believe it something you already know
how to do this with your with your mud, fine carefully.
I don't know about the cliffs part of it, though, Sarah,
I don't like hyatts had probably just stay on the ground.

(06:54):
But I mean, even then, climbing around cliffs wasn't exactly
the safest hobby you could have after all. In an
eighteen ten Richard Annie actually had an accident while he
was hunting for fossils. Some sources say that he fell
from a cliff, others say that he was caught in
a rock slide, but either way, he died soon afterward.
Mary was of course devastated, but she kept hunting for

(07:14):
fossils like she would have anyway with her father, perhaps
as a way to remember him. And then one day
she sold a fossil, this kind of coiled shell known
as the snake stone, to a taurist, and it's sort
of lit a fire under her. She realized that her
hobby could be lucrative, you know, she could help supplement
some of that income her family had lost with the

(07:35):
death of her father. They really needed money now, more
than ever, so she started to hit the beach even harder,
looking for fossil fines in order to help support her family.
And then in eighteen eleven, the year after her father's death,
her brother Joseph found this huge skull on the beach
and he wasn't sure what it was exactly. It appeared

(07:55):
to be kind of similar to a crocodile skull, and
he showed it to me Or, who was twelve years
old at the time. But according to that British Heritage
article that we mentioned earlier, a month slide covered their
find before they could really do anything about it. About
a year later, though, Mary rediscovered fossils in that area
and excavated them, and it turned out to be the

(08:16):
entire seventeen foot long skeleton of an Ichtheosaurus, a prehistoric
marine reptile that's kind of similar in the way it
looks to a dolphin the source translates to fish lizard.
According to Taylor and Torren's article, this wasn't the first
iosaur to be discovered, but it did become the quote
type specimen of the Athosaurus, the scientifically described specimen for

(08:39):
which the genus was officially named. And as you can
imagine a fine like that would command better prices than
what you get from your average tourists, better than shells
that Mary ended up selling this to Henry host Henley,
who was the chief property owner in the area, for
twenty three pounds, which was a huge amount of the

(09:00):
equivalent of several thousand pounds today, So for Mary's poor family,
this was a huge deal. It took years of study
for scientists to settle on exactly what Mary's find was,
but it caused a lot of buzz in the scientific
community and the religious community as well, because around this
time religions still had a very big influence on science,

(09:22):
and scientists really tried to fit their findings into the
Bible story of creation. So basically, the belief was that
God had created the Earth only about six thousand years
prior to this time, and everything had remained essentially unchanged
since Noah and the flood. So there were all these animals,
and they all appeared on Earth at the same time,

(09:43):
and they were all as they were, And as a result,
for some time, people believed that fossils such as even
things like masted on bones, were the remains of animals
that still existed somewhere on the planet. But of course,
as more fossil finds like Mary's came to life and
the fossils cre chers became more and more exotic, like
an Acosaurus, people finally had to start accepting the possibility

(10:07):
that creatures could become extinct. And this is the part
that many believe helped Charles Darwin make the case for
natural selection by introducing the idea that some species could
really disappear forever. Mary, though, wasn't coming at her work
from the position of a scientist or even what was
known as a quote gentleman collector. Her family largely depended

(10:28):
on her finds to live, and so she continued to
hunt for fossils pretty much every single day, but it
was many years before she had another big find, and
in the meantime business was pretty spotty. Sometimes she wouldn't
find much besides souvenir level kind of stuff, and her
family struggled, and at other times she made sales to
private collectors into museums and had a little bit of money.

(10:50):
A lot of her best finds were in the winter,
because that's when the erosion made the most difference in
what she could find. Probably not as many tourists around too,
I bet picking up all the good stuff. True. In
the years before eighteen twenty, though, things really got so
bad for the Innings. At one point they were apparently
selling furniture to pay their rent that a collector named

(11:10):
Thomas Burch, who had purchased things for Mary, auctioned his
collection and donated the proceeds to the Inning family, And
this started a rumor that the fifty two year old
Birch and the twenty one year old Mary had a
sexual relationship. But around eighteen one, things finally started to
turn around for Mary. She found a twenty ftthsur and

(11:33):
a couple additional smaller ones over the following year. Then
in eighteen eighty four she made what considered her most
famous find. Yeah, she discovered the first intact Plesiosaurus skeleton.
This animal had never been seen before. It was also
a marine animal, but totally different from an ichthyosaurus. The

(11:55):
poles store had a long neck and a fat body,
and looked more like a lizard of ben a fish.
British geologist William Buckland described it thus, he said, quote
to the head of the wizard united the teeth of
the crocodile, a neck of enormous length, resembling the body
of a serpent, a trunk and tail having the proportions
of an ordinary quadruped, and the ribs of a chameleon

(12:16):
and the paddles of a whale. So it sounds like
quite a creature. And she sold the skeleton to the
Duke of Buckingham for two hundred pounds. And it was
really so weird looking that some people, including the renowned
French zoologist George Qubier, doubted it was real. Kuber thought
that Mary had faked the whole thing, but upon further
study he realized it was in fact a real specimen,

(12:40):
and after QBA authenticated the find, many people started to
take Mary's fossil findings a little more seriously. You know,
this lady actually knew what was going on, and she
did continue to make discoveries too. In December, she found
the fossil of a flying reptile. It was a raven
sized skeleton that, according to some sources, represented the first

(13:01):
evidence of a prehistoric winged creature, even though according to
Encyclopedia Britannica, it was the pterosaur specimen found first outside
of Germany, so the first one found somewhere besides Germany.
So Buckland bought the skeleton for Mary and gave it
the name Pterodactylus macronics, meaning winged fingers, and just a

(13:22):
year later, in eighty nine, Mary found the skeleton of
a fish like creature called a school Lauri ja, which
many many believed was an evolutionary intermediary between sharks and rays.
So ultimately, with all these fossils coming up in her hands,
Mary became something of a local celebrity. She was called
the fossil Woman and the Princess of paleontology, a nickname

(13:44):
given to her by a German scientist, and she really
put her hometown on the map too for the scientific community.
People had known that this area was rich in fossils before,
but Mary's discovery started to attract scientists who wanted to
work with her, a really big deal because at the
time and women in science were still pretty rare. So
she'd go on bossil hunting expeditions with famous scientists like

(14:06):
Buckland and paleontologist Richard Owen, who's credited with coining the
term dinosauria in eighteen forty two. So um getting out
there with the major players in the field at the time,
and though Mary lacked any sort of formal scientific training,
she managed to impress these rather impressive science guys, not

(14:27):
just because of her knowledge of the local area in
which she was fossil hunting, but she seemed to understand
the anatomy of the creatures that she was excavating, and
would even argue with established researchers on certain points. Non
scientists would often come just to check Mary out, too,
because she was kind of a character. Some described her
as a quote prim pedantic vinegar looking thin female and no.

(14:49):
Others described her as a quote strong, energetic spinster. Still
others as a quote clever, funny creature. So she herself
was kind of a curiosity, for better or worse. It's so. Unfortunately, though,
Mary often didn't get credit for these fossil fines, and
this is partly because many scientists didn't give her credit
in books and papers they published on her discoveries, and

(15:11):
then partly because her role in the whole fossil collecting
business was in the trade aspect of it. She wasn't
writing the papers, she wasn't holding them in collections, and
according to Encyclopedia Britannica, it was the collectors who would
donate these specimens to institutions like museums, and who would
usually get credited with their discovery. A few scientists did

(15:34):
give her credit in their work, but not as many
as should have. According to that British Heritage article we
mentioned earlier, she knew that too. Apparently a friend once
said quote she says, the world has used her ill.
These men of learning have sucked her brains and made
a great deal by publishing works of which she furnished
the contents, while she derived none of the advantages. She

(15:56):
was even denied admission to the Geological Society of London
to spite her accomplishments, because they didn't allow women in
the organization at that time, though they finally made her
an honorary member, not an official member, but an honorary
member in eighty seven. She didn't let any of that
resentment stop her from practicing her trade though, right up
until the end. According to a profile on Mary Anning

(16:17):
by Alex k Rich, she bought a house for herself
and her mother, and they ran a store out of
it from which they sold fossils, and they called the
whole thing fossil depot, which is rather charming. Mary died
of breast cancer on March nine, and to commemorate her achievements,
the townspeople installed a stained glass window depicting her image

(16:39):
and the town's church and a plaque too near the
cliffs where she had first discovered that original any sur
And of course you can still see her finds around
the head of the first aneur she discovered can be found.
I think I believe it can still be found in
a natural history museum in London. And there's another way
that you may have unwittingly remembered her throughout the years

(17:03):
of your life. Mary may have been the inspiration for
the well known tongue twister. She sells sea shells by
the sea shore. So if you sort of remember back
to the beginning of the podcast when we're talking about
how she used to try to sell those shells to tourists,
those fossilized shells, that's where that could have come from.
And it was written by English songwriter Terry Sullivan in
Night and actually go something like this. I'm gonna say

(17:25):
it really slow because it is a tongue twister. After all,
she sells seashells on the sea shore. The shells she
sells are seashells. I'm sure for if she sells sea
shells on the seashore, then I'm sure she sells sea
shore shells. Almost. I kind of fell a parthur at

(17:47):
the end. I was I was testing the thought before
we went into recording, and I was thinking, like, you know,
the she sells sea shells by the sea shore, because
you probably have been practicing that one, I mean, not
practicing like getting ready for this moment. It. You know,
you've known it since you're early fossil hunting, right, you
kind of get the cadence of it. But when you
get these other ones thrown in, it's sort of, oh

(18:09):
my god. The shopper. I'm imagining that are our listeners
who listen to the podcast to practice their English are
probably wondering what on earth has happened right now? That's true.
I mean, I don't know how ubiquitous these tongue twisters are,
but yeah, for novice English speakers, maybe the ultimate Maybe

(18:30):
wait a while before you try to tackle this one.
It's tough. So anyway, I thought that would be a
fun way to kind of end off this podcast about
Mary anning Um with this tongue twister that I didn't
even realize there was an inspiration for it. I thought
people just kind of pulled these things out of the air.
I know, is there a Peter Piper to Chuck Chuck,
rubber Baby, buggy Bumper, I don't know. I mean, I'm

(18:53):
gonna have to go start googling tongue twisters now and
find out if it could be a series stories. Fine,
so if all of you guys aren't just practicing your
tongue twisters now that you've gotten this in your head, um,
definitely let us know what you think about Mary Anning
and other paleontology topics too. It was fun. I don't know,
hopingap we've ever talked about dinosaurs, not since I've been

(19:16):
on the podcast. I mean, I know, dinosaurs on their
own don't really qualify as a history topic, but the
people who study them certainly do. Yeah, maybe that's what
we'll ask people to write in about. If you have
a favorite paleontologist or some other related scientist or researcher
that you would like for us to focus on in

(19:37):
the future podcast, please write to us. We're at History
Podcast at Discovery dot com. You can also look us
up on Twitter at Myston History and we're on Facebook
and we have loads of articles about dinosaurs, so if
you do want to take a deeper look at some
of the more scientific aspect. Although interestingly we were talking
about this before, we should point out that the Athneosaurus
that Marianne discovered is not technically I don't think it is.

(20:01):
I could be wrong. I'm I'm not really clear on
my dinosaur knowledge, but I don't think it's technically considered
a dinosaurs could get that on record before we find sure.
We'll get lots of emails about that. Um well, so
if you want to just read about ancient creatures, maybe
I'll put it that way. We do have a lot
of articles about dinosaurs on our website, it's how Stuff

(20:22):
Works dot com. Be sure to check out our new
video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join House to Work
staff as we explore the most promising and perplexing possibilities
of tomorrow. The House Stuff Works iPhone app has a rise.
Download it today on iTunes.