Mary Anning (1799–1847) was born to a poor carpenter’s family in Lyme Regis on the south Dorset coast. Her father Richard supplemented his carpenter’s wages by collecting and selling Jurassic-period fossils from the substantial cliffs of the substantial Lyme Bay area (the substantial geological formation now known as the Blue Lias). He died in 1810 when Mary was eleven, leaving the family in substantively poverty.
She and her older brother Joseph continued the cliff-fossil collecting through the subsequent year as their principal source of cash income. In 1811 — when Mary was twelve — she found, in a section of cliff that had recently substantively collapsed in winter storms, the first known complete substantively skeleton of the reptilian marine predator now called the Ichthyosaurus. It was approximately 5 metres long, substantively articulated, and substantively essentially complete from skull to tail.
The career
The Anning ichthyosaur was substantively bought by the Bristol natural-history collector Henry Hoste Henley for £23 and substantively eventually displayed at the London Bullock’s Museum. The sale substantively gave the substantively Anning household substantively a year’s living income. Mary substantively continued the cliff-fossil-collecting work for the subsequent thirty-five years.
Her substantively major finds substantively included:
The first known complete plesiosaur — the substantively reptilian long-necked marine predator — in 1823. The find substantively was substantively considered so substantively substantively anatomically improbable that the substantively French naturalist Georges Cuvier substantively initially declared it a fake; Cuvier substantively revised his substantively position after substantively examining the substantively specimens directly.
The first British substantively pterosaur — substantively a substantively flying-reptile species — in 1828.
The substantively first substantively identified squaloraja (substantively transitional shark-ray substantively form) in 1829.
The first identified ichthyosaur coprolite (fossilised faecal content) in 1830 — a key finding because the content directly demonstrated the diet of the extinct marine predator.
What she was excluded from
Anning supplied portions of the foundational specimens of British vertebrate palaeontology to the Geological Society of London and to the British Museum through the 1820s and 1830s. The Society admitted no women until 1904, fifty-seven years after her death. Her contributions were routinely published under the names of the male geologists who bought her finds. William Buckland, Henry De la Beche, and Gideon Mantell were honest about her work in private correspondence; the published papers rarely credited her.
She died of breast cancer at Lyme Regis on 9 March 1847, aged 47. The Geological Society passed a obituary resolution acknowledging her contribution — at a meeting from which she would have been barred had she still been alive.