The Dinosaur Artist

by Paige Williams

  In the Nemegt Formation, where the Russians found T. bataar, they made camp and walked around for two days. Tuvshin returned to a couple of Protoceratops eggs he’d seen earlier and dug them out of the cliff face. Eric found an ankylosaur scute. They collected whatever they could easily carry. At Bugiin Tsav, a well-known dinosaur locality that was on all the tourist itineraries, they found what was left of a Gallimimus skeleton.

  At a military post outside the city, Tuvshin walked up to the base and asked if they could drive a tank. A tank wasn’t available, but they were allowed to shoot AK-47s and an RPG as long as they paid for the ammo. In the city, Tuvshin took them to where he kept a shipping container full of the enormous skulls and horns of argali sheep, and to a cookout, where they drank beer and had a barbecue. Later, Tuvshin pulled his Land Cruiser into a parking lot to meet with a guy selling an enormous tarbosaur tooth, which Eric bought.

  Before flying home, Eric placed a large order on behalf of himself and Moore, his new business partner in England. Back in Florida, he wired Tuvshin $100,000 as a down payment. It wasn’t long before a shipping container departed Mongolia aboard a coal train headed south. The container was packed with traditional Mongolian gers, plus chairs, tables, and chests. The train crossed the Chinese border and headed southeast, past Beijing, stopping at Tianjin, a port city of 14 million on the Bo Hai gulf. The container was loaded onto the CMA CGM Vela, a brand-new container ship nearly four football fields long and 49 yards wide, sailing under the flag of Germany. Tucked among the gers were the crated skeletons of Gobi dinosaurs. Eric had entrusted an enormous amount of money to a stranger on the other side of the world, with no legal recourse if the deal went bad. His only way of monitoring the “investment” was to watch the Vela’s progress online, on a website that showed real-time maritime traffic in digital blips. On his computer at Serenola he identified the neon ship-shaped speck that represented the Vela as it made its journey of over 12,000 nautical miles. Checking back daily, sometimes hourly, he followed the vessel as it moved from Yellow Sea to East China Sea to Hangzhou Bay to Philippine Sea and on, relieved to see it finally make port at Liverpool.

  CHAPTER 14

  THE GHOST OF MARY ANNING

  THE SEA THRASHED AT THE SOUTHWESTERN SHORE OF ENGLAND for eons with no one to notice, but around the year 774, a village appeared between two of the oldest cliffs. The first mention of Lyme emerged when King Cynewulf granted a manor to Sherborne Abbey, which owned salt mining rights near the river Lym. By the time William the Conqueror surveyed England in 1085, Lyme consisted roughly of nine villagers, thirteen salt workers, four ploughlands, a meadow, and ten acres of woods. The lords of Lyme came and went—Wulfgeat, Aelfeva, Bellett—and in 1284 King Edward I granted the town its royal charter, making it Lyme Regis.

  The port at Lyme Bay featured a serpentine breakwater called the Cobb, which protected the harbor like half an embrace. Made of boulders and oak trunks, the breakwater shielded vessels from the storms that whipped through the English Channel from the North Sea. Despite Lyme’s reputation as an inhospitable harbor—“verrie daungerous in tyme of wynter and tempestes”—the town traded with France, 20 miles across the channel, “wool out, wine in.”

  Cottages stood along the foreshore just above the sea. Narrow streets wound steeply inland, lined with two- and three-story buildings with shops at street level and apartments above. “While most of the town slept at night, another age-old maritime industry thrived,” wrote the novelist John Fowles, who lived in Lyme for forty years. In the late 1700s and early 1800s, smugglers worked the beach. In their fast, armed cutters, they used the French towns of Cherbourg and Guernsey as their pickup points, then sank their silk, brandy, and tobacco offshore until “the coast was literally clear.”

  Tempests had been known to take out half the village. Sections of land and construction occasionally lurched and disappeared: a church meadow, a whole harbor. The battering knocked strange objects loose from the coastal cliffs that loomed for 96 miles, their layers a towering vision. Locals called the objects “verteberries” and “ladies’ fingers” and “thunderbolts,” for the way they were shaped, or just plain “curios.” The rocks were so distinctive, smugglers disembarking at Lyme in the dead of night could confirm their location by touch.

  The coiled rocks called “snakestones” looked especially beautiful as decorations for jewelry boxes and picture frames, or displayed as a conversation piece. They were popular with the wealthy travelers who had started vacationing at the coast on the advice of a Brighton doctor who praised the health benefits of ocean bathing. Lyme, in the county of Dorset, became a spa destination as Romantic-era travelers sought out “the beauties of ‘wild’ nature.” The streets were narrow and dirty, and there wasn’t much of a path to the sea, but the village had a reputation for having kept two of its citizens alive past age ninety.

  A cabinetmaker named Richard Anning moved to Lyme with his bride, Mary, called “Molly,” in September 1793. They rented a timber-framed house on Bridge Street, at Gun Cliff, where the town cannon ever pointed toward France. At home at the buddle of the river Lym, the Annings lived so close to the sea, the waves beat at their windows and often washed through their rooms. They shared tiny cobblestone Cockmoile Square with a shoemaker and the jail, around the corner from the Three Cups Inn.

  The Church of England banned dissenters from certain jobs and privileges, which put Richard out of contention for both university and the military. He was a Congregationalist living in a country where war had worsened poverty. For extra money, he sold the curios that turned up at the beach. Only two other “fossilists” were known to work the area, a fellow everyone called “Captain Curi,” and a former Piccadilly coal merchant named John Crookshank who jabbed at the cliffs with a long pole.

  The year after moving to Lyme, the Annings had their first child, also Mary. Then they had a second, Joseph. In the winter of 1798, amid record-low temperatures and coal and firewood shortages, the little girl got too close to the stove, and her clothes caught fire. She became the first of seven Anning children who would not survive childhood.

  Molly was pregnant at the time of her first daughter’s death. She gave birth on May 21, 1799, and once again named her girl Mary. The surviving Mary Anning was a sickly baby, said to be listless and dull. Fifteen months into her life, on August 19, 1800, she was taken to an equestrian show in town by a nurse and neighbor, Elizabeth Haskings. Around a quarter to five in the afternoon, it started raining. Haskings was standing beneath a large elm with her friends Fanny Fowler and Martha Drower, holding Mary in her arms, when lightning struck the tree. “As the spectators’ senses returned they were aware of a brief stillness interrupted only by the incessant rain,” one historian wrote. “A person pointed to the base of the steaming, burnt tree and began to run to it.”

  Haskings and her friends were clearly dead. Baby Mary appeared unconscious. Someone grabbed her up and rushed her home to Richard and Molly, who put her in a hot bath and revived her. Mary not only lived, but was said to have been transformed by the lightning into an energetic, engaged child.

  Lyme Regis had become a larger and more important port even than Liverpool. When travelers came for the bathing machines and the bracing channel waters, they often returned home with souvenirs bought from Richard Anning. Brits of a certain class liked to display their nature collections in specially made cabinets, and Anning supplied both—cabinet and curiosity. When the young writer Jane Austen visited Lyme with her family, she consulted the cabinetmaker about fixing the lid of a broken chest, walking away when she was quoted a price that she considered “beyond the value of all the furniture in the room altogether.”

  One day in 1807, Richard walked a mile or so north to Charmouth, to sell fossils outside the Pilot Boat Inn, a stagecoach stop between Exeter and London. Returning home, he fell down a cliff, severely injuring his back. Soon after that, he made a bad business decision and accrued debt. Soon after that, he came down with tuberculosis. He died a
few years later, at age forty-four, leaving Molly pregnant again and deeply in debt at a time when the people of Lyme were so desperate for food and money, some were selling their hair. As Molly applied for parish relief, her oldest children, Joseph and Mary, took over their father’s fossil trade.

  Quality fossils for scientific research were hard to get, and a smart hunter could earn a decent living by selling to the gentlemen scientists and university professors who were working out the new discipline of geology. The fertile cliffs and outcrops of Dorset would become known as the Jurassic Coast, for nowhere on earth is such a lengthy, raw swath of prehistory so vividly visible. The coastline altogether reflects not just one period of the Mesozoic but rather all three: the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous—one shoreline, roughly 186 million years of earth history. Because the coastline constantly shifts, signs and maps warn of rockfalls and mudflows. A careless beachcomber could die in any number of ways—trapped by the tide, dragged out to sea, dashed against the rocks.

  Mary Anning hunted anyway.

  Shortly after Mary turned eleven, her brother Joseph came across an odd skull and dug it out of a cliff. The skull was 4 feet long, with room for two hundred teeth, and orbital sockets that suggested eyes the size of prize onions. Joseph was by now apprenticing himself to an upholsterer and had less time for fossils, but Mary went on searching for the rest of the skeleton. Working in boots and a bonnet or cloak, and with the entanglements of voluminous ankle-length skirts, she carried a stick for balance and a basket for collecting smaller items. Within a year she had located a skeleton near where the skull had turned up. It was said that she had the bones hauled to Cockmoile Square piece by piece, where she cleaned them, revealing a creature nearly 17 feet long, with a mouth like a crocodile, a snout like a swordfish, and flippers like a dolphin.

  A local landowner and enthusiastic natural history collector named Henry Hoste Henley bought Mary’s strange “stone crocodile” for about 23 pounds, enough to feed the Anning family for six months. Henley, in turn, sold the specimen to William Bullock’s Museum of Natural Curiosities in London, presumably for much more than Henley had paid Mary. Specimens similar to this one had already surfaced, but Mary’s was the most spectacular because it was the most complete. Sir Everard Home, in “Some Account of the Fossil Remains of an Animal,” a paper for Transactions of the Royal Society, began a series of articles describing the creature in 1814, ultimately crediting Henley, the buyer, as the discoverer, without mentioning Mary Anning at all. The British Museum in turn bought the skeleton from Bullock’s at auction for 45 pounds, more than double what Mary had been paid for it not even five years earlier. The creature was named Ichthyosaurus, “fish lizard,” and its discovery electrified the scientific community, adding to the ongoing debate about the age and origin of Earth. Men like William Buckland, the first geology professor at Oxford, and Henry Thomas De La Beche, who founded the groundbreaking Geological Survey of Great Britain, became Mary’s connection to science, and she a conduit to their success.

  Mary specialized in invertebrates because the Jurassic Coast is so full of them, but she prized vertebrates because they fetched more at market. By the time she turned eighteen, she had a reputation as a talented fossil hunter who cared deeply about the scientific discipline, which, in 1822, would finally get a name: “palaeontologie.” Yet she was as poor as ever. When one of her best clients, Thomas Birch, a Life Guards officer, visited Lyme Regis in 1818 he found the Annings so broke that they were planning to sell their furniture. Outraged, Birch decided to auction his fossil collection to benefit the Annings; after all, the family had “found almost all the fine things which have been submitted to scientific investigation.”

  The auction began on May 15, 1820, drawing attendees from Paris, Vienna, and Germany, among them Georges Cuvier. The French naturalist would change the world with his revelation that some species went extinct, a conclusion he would not have reached without fossils. His presence at Bullock’s made it clear that he considered the young hunter of Lyme a vital contributor to science. Fetching 400 pounds, the auction gave the Annings financial security for the first time in their lives.

  No other fossil hunter anywhere in the world was making as many discoveries as Mary Anning. She went on to find three species of Plesiosaurus; cephalopod ink chambers, which led to understanding of animal defense mechanisms; the first pterosaurs found outside Germany; the shark-ray Squaloraja polyspondyla, a vital transitional fossil that helped Cuvier prove extinction; and coprolites, or fossil feces, which are way more important than they sound. An early edition of the Bristol Mirror praised the “persevering female” who for years had searched for “valuable relics of a former world” that were “at the continual risk of being… destroyed by the returning tide.”

  The science fascinated Mary as much as the fossil sales episodically sustained her. She cut creatures apart in an attempt to understand how they worked. She copied out scientific papers by hand, adding detailed technical illustrations. She wrote to the British Museum, asking for a full list of its collection. She tried to learn French, in order to better communicate with Cuvier. By 1826, when she was twenty-seven, Mary received so many fossil-obsessed visitors that she moved from Cockmoile Square to a larger home on Broad Street, the village’s hilly main road, with a view of the sea but not so directly a taste of it. She lived with her mother and brother in the back rooms and kept the rest as Anning’s Fossil Depot, where an ichthyosaur skeleton filled the front window.

  A trio of well-off sisters named Philpot had moved to Lyme from London and Mary had become friends with them, often visiting their cottage on Silver Street. Despite their differences in age and class, Mary and one of the sisters, Elizabeth, hunted together. The Philpots compiled a meticulously labeled fossil collection that drew geologists from around the kingdom. Mary used their visits to build on the early lessons she had received from the Congregationalists, who believed in educating the poor. “The extraordinary thing in this young woman is that she has made herself so thoroughly acquainted with the science that the moment she finds any bones she knows to what tribe they belong,” a Londoner, Lady Harriet Silvester, wrote in her diary after meeting Mary. “She fixes the bones on a frame with cement and then makes drawings and has them engraved… It is certainly a wonderful instance of divine favour—that this poor, ignorant girl should be so blessed, for by reading and application she has arrived to that degree of knowledge as to be in the habit of writing and talking with professors and other clever men on the subject, and they all acknowledge that she understands more of the science than anyone else in this kingdom.”

  Every other Saturday a ship called Unity departed Lyme for London. Mary often sent her fossils north, but in the summer of 1829, it was she herself who boarded. The geologist Roderick Murchison and his wife, Charlotte, had invited her to the city, her first visit. Mary had recently sold a complete plesiosaur to the British Museum, and she wanted to see it. She had never set foot inside the museum that showcased her unattributed labors, or inside any museum at all, for that matter. She had never been anywhere at all. She also hoped to tour the museum and the Geological Society, whose first president was her old friend William Buckland, who grew up hunting fossils at Lyme.

  The Unity cruised up the coast to the Thames River, landing at London Bridge, where Mary disembarked into a city of nearly two million people, the world’s largest metropolis. She made her way toward Regent’s Park, near where the Murchisons lived. No record of the visit exists, not even of her stop at the Geological Society, but the geologist William Lonsdale was known to have given Mary a private tour of the place that had gladly accepted her discoveries but not her. A friend of Mary’s, Anna Maria Pinney, once noted in her journal that “men of learning have sucked her brains, and made a great deal of publishing works, of which she furnished the contents, while she derived none of the advantages.”

  Anyone important in the emerging sciences of geology and paleontology eventually found their way to Anning�
��s Fossil Depot. The groundbreaking geologist Charles Lyell contacted Mary to ask how the cliffs were holding up. Adam Sedgwick, who taught at Cambridge and whose students included Charles Darwin, became a client and friend. The renowned zoologist Louis Agassiz became the first to name species after her, memorializing Mary—finally—with Acrodus anningiae and Belenostomus anningiae. “Her history shows what humble people may do, if they have just purpose and courage enough, towards promoting the cause of science,” Charles Dickens later wrote in All the Year Round. He added, “The carpenter’s daughter has won a name for herself, and deserved to win it.”

  Still, more often than not, it was the gentlemen scientists who got the thanks, along with the dukes and the lords. Of all the important fossil creatures found at Lyme, not a single one carried Mary Anning’s name.

  When Mary was thirty and her brother thirty-three, Joseph married Amelia Reader and moved to St. Michael’s Street, near the Annings’ first cottage on Cockmoile Square. Mary and her mother remained on Broad Street. Mary went on making discoveries and selling them to the British Museum. She was so good at finding fossils and so bad at being paid well for them that she got a London agent, George Brettingham Sowerby I, a King Street conchologist and an artist of natural history. But as the economy failed, she once again ran out of money. Her friend Henry De La Beche devised another a fund-raising idea: an amateur artist, he painted a scenic watercolor of prehistoric Dorset based largely on Mary’s discoveries, calling the picture Duria Antiquior, “A More Ancient Dorset.” Creatures swam and flew and walked on land. Ichthyosaurus vulgaris bloodily snapped the neck of Plesiosaurus dolichodeirus, which, in its death throes, expelled coprolites. Ichthyosaurus tenuirostris gobbled up Dapedium politum. Pterodactylus macronyx wheeled through a pasty sky. Overall the piece depicted a crowded little aquatic scene of Jurassic predation, most of which was known to science—known at all—because of Mary.