5 Favorite Facts about Mary Anning
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You know, I liked Mary Anning even before I read Shelley Emling’s book about her, but now I frankly adore her. Here’s five of the reasons why:
1. Everything male naturalists could do, she did in heavy skirts and pattens.
You know how Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire could do, only backwards and in high heels? That was basically Mary. She not only was a supremely talented fossil hunter, she had impediments the men didn’t have. She scrambled over incredibly challenging terrain in bulky skirts, wearing metal and wood contraptions over her shoes that, while handy for keeping one from sinking into mud, must have been a nightmare as far as balance and traction are concerned. She outran rogue waves, sudden storm tides, and actual bloody landslides in that gear.
The dudes would have died.
2. Mary performed numerous dissections of modern creatures in order to understand the fossils she was finding.
She spent hours painstakingly dissecting cephalopods, fish, and other marine critters on her kitchen table. She, with no formal training or fancy instruments, took apart these messy, flabby creatures, and did it neatly enough to understand how they’re put together. Then she was able to correlate what she was seeing in these modern animals with the fossils of ancient extinct critters.
She didn’t even have the equivalent of an elementary education, by the way.
This woman had a first-rate scientific mind.
3. She was the first to get fossilized shit together.
Nothing seems to have got past this woman, including 100+ million year-old bowel movements. She noticed that the odd mishappen stones with dark bits in which the locals called bezoar stones, were quite often in or near the abdominal or pelvic regions of the skeletons she found. She showed them to Buckland, and told him she thought they were petrified poop (she probably said it more delicately). He was skeptical. But when he consulted Gideon Mantell, and the two reviewed the evidence, Mantell concurred with Mary: these were, indeed, the shite.
So she and Buckland reconstituted that fossil poop to find out what ichthyosaurs ate.
I’m just grateful to Mary’s mom for allowing their kitchen to be used in disgusting and stinky investigations for science!
4. Mary picked the brains of learned men, and beseeched them for scientific papers to read, expanding her knowledge in an age where women were barred from academia.
She copied those papers right down to faithfully reproducing the illustrations. She was a talented artist as well as scientist.
She made fast friends with many of the foremost geologists of the day. Many people would have been intimidated, especially a young, impoverished, lower-class, uneducated single woman. She lived in an age when all of those things were serious strikes against her, but no kidding, there she was, holding intense conversations on matters of science, investigating the Jurassic formations with them, pumping them for all of the knowledge she could get. She impressed nearly everyone she met with her knowledge and skill, which allowed her to pry open doors that otherwise would have remained stubbornly closed.
Nothing was going to stop her from learning and discovering. That’s probably the thing I admire most about her.
Letter and sketch by Mary Anning regarding her discovery of the first pleisiosaur. Credit: Wellcome Collection (CC BY 4.0)
5. Her plesiosaur discovery (briefly) humbled Georges Cuvier.
When Mary discovered the first Plesiosaurus skeleton, it seemed too bizarre to be real. The famous Georges Cuvier, the premier anatomist of his time, just couldn’t accept the find was legit. 35 neck vertebrae? C’est impossible! He was certain the fossil was faked. But Mary’s esteemed friends convinced other members of the Geological Society of London that her bizarre beast was genuine. And upon review of her exquisite drawings and meticulously-excavated skeleton, even Cuvier had to admit he was wrong.
It’s not, so far as I know, recorded what Mary thought of the whole kerfluffle. But she wasn’t shy about giving her bestie Buckland good-natured grief about his, in her expert opinion, woeful anatomical science, so I’d imagine she wasn’t so much intimidated as irritated.
She may also have tried to teach herself French so she could communicate with Cuvier directly. I wish I had just one quarter of her drive, determination, and courage!
Mary Anning was one of the most remarkable people to have ever existed on this planet. I hope she’s the inspiration for many more remarkable women to come.
Portrait of Mary Anning by B. J. Donne
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