During the 19th century, Mary Anning (1799 to 1847) was an enigma. A self-taught fossil-hunter and paleontologist—during a time when science was most definitely a man’s world—in the 21st century Anning has finally started to get the attention she deserves for the role she played excavating glimpses into prehistory at the Jurassic coast near her home town of Lyme Regis in Dorset, England.
In 2020, Anning was famously portrayed by Kate Winslet in the film Ammonite, which focused on her solitary life hunting down fossils along the sea shore in order to support herself and her family as they struggled financially. This wasn’t the first time that she had provided inspiration; in modern times, she’s been featured in cartoons, literature, films, novels, and even poetry.
Most recently she became the subject of a crowdfunding campaign—called Mary Anning Rocks—to create a bronze statue overlooking the Black Ven cliffs which were her fossil hunting stomping grounds. With the enthusiastic support of the local community, Anning’s statue was finally unveiled in May 2022, coinciding with the 223rd anniversary of her birth.
Why has Anning garnered such attention? Born into humble origins during the Georgian era, fossil hunting was a family endeavor. As a young child Mary Anning would accompany her father as he scoured the area for fossils to sell at his shop. The family struggled to make ends meet and their prehistoric finds generation a much-needed supplement to their income. When her father died suddenly in 1810, she continued the tradition, famously uncovering the complete skeleton of an Ichthyosaurus which ended up at the Natural History Museum in London. She was just 11 years old.
At the time, her role in this, and subsequent, discoveries was barely mentioned. Poverty and her gender had a lot to do with it, but more recently historians have pieced together her noteworthy contributions from a handful of newspaper reports and diary entries by the many admirers who began to flock to Lyme Regis to visit her small fossil workshop in the hopes of snapping up a piece of ancient history. Many of her fossils ended up in important museum collections and even inspired some of the evolutionary ideas within Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species.
Discover more about Mary Anning and her work in the article ‘History Heroes: Mary Anning,’ available in the July - August 2023 issue of Ancient Origins Magazine. Get it here!
Featured Image: Detail of a portrait of Mary Anning. Source: Public domain
