A few months ago a stylish set of rooms were opened in London’s Natural History Museum. They include a restaurant, a study and a floor-to-ceiling cabinet displaying biological treasures and curiosities. Here, patrons of the museum gather to relax and contemplate nature’s wonders in a setting named after one of the most remarkable of all explorers of Earth’s ancient marvels: Mary Anning.
“We could have named the rooms after many ‘greats’: Alfred Waterhouse, who designed the museum, or David Attenborough. But in the end there was really only one choice. The Anning Rooms it had to be,” said museum executive Christina Heap.
It is an extraordinary transformation. Until recently Anning was a little known figure. Today she is major news. It has just been announced that Kate Winslet is to play her in Ammonite, a period drama about Anning’s life; a campaign, Mary Anning Rocks, has been launched to fund the creation of a statue of her; and she is a candidate to have her face on the next £50 note.
Two hundred years after she began making her remarkable discoveries, Anning is getting the recognition she deserves. “It has been a long time coming, but at least it is happening,” said Paul Barrett, a dinosaur expert at the museum.
Born in 1799 in Lyme Regis, Anning helped her father Richard sell the fossils he gathered on the Dorset coast. He died when Mary was 11, so she and her brother Joseph took over the business – with spectacular success, uncovering in 1811 the 16ft fossil of a sea monster belonging to the genus now known as Ichthyosaurus. These were followed by other major finds, including plesiosaurs and pterosaurs.
These were crucial discoveries. The French naturalist Georges Cuvier had just proposed the idea of extinction – that in the past some species had simply died out. “It was controversial because it implied not all God’s creations were perfect. Some were doomed to failure,” said Barrett. Anning’s findings played a vital role in this debate.
Within a few years, her advice was being sought from all quarters – by men who published papers that relied heavily on her discoveries and interpretations, but who gave her no credit. Only recently has Anning’s full impact become apparent.
“She was poor, she was a woman and came from a nonconformist family,” said Barrett. “These factors all worked against her – although, without doubt, being female was the worst impediment. Women were then not allowed to join scientific societies. So the Geological Society discussed her findings, but would not let her in those meetings because women were banned.”
Anning’s humble background was also a problem for fossil collecting, which was then the prerogative of the rich. “They were collected and studied by wealthy surgeons or clever vicars with time on their hands,” said Barrett. “For good measure, Anning’s father was a protestant nonconformist, and that only further distanced her from the establishment.”
But on one count she was lucky. Anning lived near a remarkably rich source of fossils: Dorset’s “Jurassic coast”. Two hundred million years ago, the area was covered by a sea in which huge reptiles hunted squid and fish. Later they died and their bodies were fossilised on the seabed. Tectonic activity forced the land upwards and those fossil graves were then exposed to the elements.
Anning, a gifted fossil hunter, made the most of this remarkable landscape – though it was not easy work. In 1833 she was injured in a landslide that took the life of her faithful dog Tray (who is depicted lying at her feet in the only known portrait of her, now hanging in the Anning Rooms).
At the same time, Anning acquired an extraordinary anatomical knowledge of the sea beasts she was digging up. “In a letter to the geologist William Buckland, she refers to the cervical vertebrae and the caracoid bones of an ichthyosaur she had uncovered,” said Andrea Hart, a special-collections manager at the Natural History Museum. “She was becoming an expert.”
Intriguingly, in the same letter, Anning apologises for not including a sketch of the ichthyosaur: “My eyes are so inflamed with picking [at the fossil] that I could not see to draw.” Removing 200 million years of mud and dirt from a giant fossil was an uncomfortable business.
“She was undoubtedly a great field worker,” said Adrian Currie, an anthropologist at Exeter University. “The question is: just how influential was she as a scientist? She found great things, but was her interpretations of them influential? How did she affect scientific thinking? It is an open question. Historians have only come to appreciate her work in the last 20 years. I think we will have to wait another 20 to fully appreciate just how wide was her influence.”
