7
ON THE BEACH
The Cobb, a long grey wall curving out to sea, is the outstanding feature of Lyme Regis in Dorset. John Fowles’s novel The French Lieutenant’s Woman calls it ‘quite simply the most beautiful sea-rampart on the south coast of England . . . a last bulwark against all that wild eroding coast to the west’.1
The coast of Lyme Regis was the birthplace and inspiration of Mary Anning. Her discoveries in the first half of the nineteenth century have led to her being acclaimed in her lifetime as the greatest fossil-hunter the world has ever known.
Born in 1799, from youth to middle age Anning was a familiar figure on the Lyme shoreline in her long skirt, shawl, bonnet and basket, endlessly toiling to find the treasures she knew were buried in the unstable rocks and in the sands uncovered at low tide. With phenomenal skill and knowledge, she combed the cliffs and the beach for marine fossils such as ammonites (spiral-shaped rocks once called ‘snake stones’) and belemnites (small, bullet-shaped invertebrate fossils), believed to have magical or curative properties. Anning was adept not only at spotting and extracting the fragments but also at cleaning and polishing them, so that their details were best revealed. Her speciality came to be known as palaeontology.
Today Anning stands high on the list of once-forgotten, now-revered females. A familiar feminist tale can be made of her life: she did the work, the men got the credit. But that is a caricature. Low social class and poverty far more than gender are what kept Mary Anning out of the London geological community, dominated by wealthy Anglican gentlemen. Yet in the twenty-first century she has become an icon – the subject of biographies, a novel, and a costumed re-enactment at London’s Natural History Museum.
Her family, who lived in a house on the town’s bridge, were religious Dissenters. She learned to read at the Sunday school run by the Congregational Church and before long was able to study scientific papers and perform dissections to understand the anatomy of the fossils on her table. From an early age, she knew that any heavy rainstorm was likely to expose bones buried in the chalk. Her first big find came in 1811, when she was twelve.
Richard Anning, her father, was a skilled cabinet-maker. He moved to Lyme Regis in 1793 after his marriage and found himself becoming less interested in the containers than in the things contained. The strangely shaped curios found on the beach were ideal trophies to put into the display cabinets that stood in fashionable drawing rooms. Lyme Regis itself was a popular tourist resort booming with the new activity of ‘sea-bathing’, performed for health rather than for exercise. (Bathers’ modesty was protected by bathing machines that allowed them to splash in the salt water, uncovered bodies unseen.) Richard Anning, with a ready market provided by tourists seeking souvenirs and refuge from the rain, set up a stall in front of his shop and filled it with sea treasures. He taught fossil-hunting to his son and daughter, who accompanied him as he searched the cliffs.
When Mary was ten and a woman gave her half a crown for an ammonite, she was on her way. She learned early the practicality of strapping pattens – a protective overshoe – over her ordinary shoes to keep her feet raised above the damp sand. Indeed, long skirts were impractical too, but in the early nineteenth century, trousers were not an option for an English female.
The Anning family had a troubled life. Seven of their children died early, the eldest in a fire at the hearth in their home. Richard Anning died of consumption in 1810 at the age of forty-four, having been weakened by a fall from a cliff. A baby born the following year died at birth. Thus the family was reduced to three: Mary, her older brother, Joseph, and their mother, Mary Moore, for whom her surviving son and daughter were the only hope of staying out of the poorhouse.
Fossils came to the rescue. To catch the eye of tourists, Mary and Joseph set up a table of stony curios (they called them ‘curiosities’) near the coach stop at a local inn. As the growing enthusiasm for geology had raised the price of fossils, the pair were more successful than their father could have dreamed.
In 1811 Joseph uncovered a huge skull protruding from a cliff. It was four feet long, with gaping eyes and more than 200 teeth. Because Joseph was committed to an apprenticeship to an upholsterer, he asked his sister to try to find the rest of the skeleton. She tried hard but as that part of the beach became covered by a mudslide, she ended up working on the project for nearly a year. (The whole town knew of it, especially because of her reputation as a girl ‘blessed by divine favour’: as a fifteen-month-old infant she had survived a bolt of lightning that killed the young neighbour holding her and two other girls as well – a stroke of fortune that made her something of a legend in Lyme Regis.) Digging away, with some help from local quarrymen, Mary uncovered virtually the entire connected skeleton whose head her brother had found. After local men removed it from the hillside, she cleaned it and reassembled the pieces of what turned out to be a giant reptile, with four fin-like flippers, a large tail and – perhaps its most distinctive feature – a ring of bony plates surrounding a large eye. Nothing like it had been seen before.
Assembled, the skeleton with the gaping eye sockets stretched to seventeen feet. The lord of the manor, Henry Hoste Henley, bought it for £23, then sold it to the London collector William Bullock for his Museum of Natural Curiosities at 22 Piccadilly. There it was placed in the new ‘Egyptian Hall’ where crowds flocked to stare at it. The startling fossil was described for the Royal Society in six scientific papers (none of which mentioned either Joseph or Mary Anning’s name) and it was assigned to a new reptilian genus called Ichthyosaurus – fish lizard. In 1819 the British Museum bought it for £24 and accepted the Ichthyosaurus name.
This spectacular fossil, revealed in the same early decade of the nineteenth century that produced William Smith’s great map, was yet one more new inescapable statement of the great age of the earth.
In 1820 a local patron, Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Birch, organised an auction of specimens he had bought from the young Annings. The sale attracted much publicity and raised £400 for the Anning family.
As a teenager Mary made the acquaintance of the first of the important geologists who would admire her achievements. Henry De la Beche was then a young man, years away from the Great Devonian Controversy that later engulfed him; he was then merely a handsome sixteen-year-old who had been expelled from a military college for insubordination and who had moved to Lyme Regis with his newly remarried mother. He and Mary combed the cliffs together. Later he publicised her discovery of the new genus, Ichthyosaurus, at the Geological Society.
It was sometime around 1815 that Mary Anning first met William Buckland. The then unmarried Oxford professor often came down to Dorset on his black mare, carrying his blue bag and hammers, to explore the coast he knew so well from childhood. On one visit he looked up the now-famous young fossil-hunter. There was talk in Lyme Regis about the pair being seen often on the beach together. Years later, Buckland’s daughter recalled that ‘local gossip preserved traditions of his adventures with that geological celebrity, Mary Anning, in whose company he was seen wading up to his knees in search of fossils in the Blue Lias’.2
Mary Anning went on to find new and more complete skeletons of ichthyosaurs. In 1823 she uncovered the complete skeleton of the long-necked plesiosaurus – the giant specimen that Conybeare was unable to get up the stairs at the Geological Society a few months later. ‘Find’ is the wrong verb. It had taken her ten years to dig it out. The Duke of Buckingham, having first checked its authenticity with Conybeare, had agreed to pay Mary Anning £110 for the skeleton – then the highest price ever paid for a fossil.
Her discoveries escalated. In 1828 Anning’s work was noticed in the Bristol Mirror. The new Bristol Institute had bought an ichthyosaur skeleton she had found. The article recounted the difficulties of her work: ‘This persevering female has for years gone daily in search of fossil remains of importance at every tide, for many miles under the hanging cliffs at Lyme, whose fallen masses are her immediate object, as the
y alone contain these valuable relics of a former world, which must be snatched at the moment of their fall, at the continual risk of being crushed by the returning tide – to her exertions we owe nearly all the fine specimens of ichthyosauri of the great collections.’3 The risk of her work was indeed considerable. There was the constant danger of landslides. One fell on her beloved dog, Tray, burying him, and despite her frantic efforts to dig him out, he did not survive.
In 1829 she uncovered a squaloraja (a fossil fish, transitional between a ray and a shark). In the winter of 1830 she made her fifth major discovery: another new species of plesiosaur, which came to be called Plesiosaurus macrocephalus for its extraordinarily large head.4 She wrote to Buckland and De la Beche that ‘it is without exception the most beautiful fossil I have ever seen’.5 (It was bought by a Conservative MP for £200.) She never made any attempt to publish her findings.
Anning kept up her pace of discovery. In 1828 she found a pterosaur, the first flying reptile ever found in Britain. In 1829 she found a winged skeleton with a large skull, a long beak, two types of teeth – long in the front, shorter sharp ones at the back, and four fingers: in other words, a gigantic flying lizard. Buckland travelled down to Lyme Regis to see it. He then broke the news for the Geological Society and at last mentioned her name: ‘Miss Mary Anning . . . has recently found the skeleton of an unknown species of that most rare and curious of all reptiles’ – he meant a flying lizard, a pterosaur.
Buckland did not stop there. Rapturously he drew comparisons with a crocodile, a lizard, a bat, an iguana: ‘in short, a monster resembling nothing that has ever been seen or heard-of upon earth, excepting the dragons of romance and heraldry’.6 Today it is identified as Dimorphodon – a creature with two kinds of teeth.
Anning’s discoveries became incontestable evidence for the extinction of species. Until then most geologists, such as Lyell, believed that animals did not become extinct but might be found somewhere else on earth. The bizarre nature of Anning’s fossils opened the door to understanding life as it had existed in the distant ages of geological history. At a time when London Zoo, opened in April 1828, gave visitors their first sight of elephants, giraffes and rhinoceroses, the public was prepared to be told that the earth was once inhabited by gigantic reptiles.
Anning’s reputation spread abroad; she had many visitors who came to see the famed fossilist as well as the famed coast. In 1844 King Frederick Augustus II of Saxony visited her and paid her £15 for a fossil of an ichthyosaurus six feet long. Supplying her name and address to the Saxon king’s personal physician and guide, she wrote beside it: ‘I am well known throughout the whole of Europe.’7
She still needed money though. Her health was poor: in her late thirties, in recognition of her research and predicament, Anning was granted an annuity raised jointly by the British Association for the Advancement of Science and the Geological Society. Many distinguished Europeans clamoured to meet her and to see her finds.8 In 1830 her original findings were memorialised in the classic art work of early geology. Her friend, now an artist, Henry De la Beche arrived on her doorstep and presented her with a copy of his Duria Antiquior, which depicted, as she would have recognised, her personal discoveries: three types of ichthyosaur, a plesiosaur and the Dimorphodon. He had created the piece specifically for Anning’s benefit and gave her the proceeds.
As far as is known, Anning never had any suitors. Yet she was not immune to male charms. She told Charlotte Murchison, wife of Roderick, that her husband was ‘certainly the handsomest piece of flesh and blood I ever saw’.9 That did not spoil their friendship. When the Murchisons first visited in 1828, Roderick told his wife to stay in Lyme for a few weeks to ‘become a good practical fossilist, by working with the celebrated Mary Anning of that place’. The two women became lifelong friends and it was Charlotte, with her wealthy connections, who helped Mary reach collectors in Europe.
The following year, Anning, having seen her brother marry, visited London for the first and only time in her life. The Murchisons had long urged her to come and in 1829 she stayed with them in elegant Belgrave Square. She visited the British Museum and was bewildered by the luxury and poverty and bustle of the capital.
Her work progressed but her health continued to fail. In 1846 Buckland persuaded the Geological Society to create an additional fund for her. In that year also she was named the first honorary member of the new Dorset County Museum in Dorchester. Her illness was breast cancer, and she suffered, often bedridden, for another two years before dying at the age of forty-seven.
By the time of her death she had, like her brother Joseph, left the Dissenters and joined the Anglican church of St Michael’s in Lyme Regis. Although undoubtedly not her intention, the conversion allowed her to be buried in the churchyard overlooking the sea, with a stained-glass window (to whose cost the Geological Society contributed) commemorating both ‘her usefulness in furthering the science of geology’ and ‘her benevolence of heart, and integrity of life’.10
In 1848 De la Beche, at the end of his presidential address to the Geological Society (he was also director general of the new Geological Survey) recalled the ‘talent and good conduct’ of Mary Anning who, ‘though not placed among even the easier classes of society, but one who had to earn her daily bread by her labour, yet contributed by her talents and untiring researches in no small degree to our knowledge of the great Enalio-Saurians, and other forms of organic life entombed in the vicinity of Lyme Regis’.11
Life was kinder to De la Beche himself. He was knighted in 1842 and in 1852 was awarded the Geological Society’s Wollaston Medal for his efforts in turning geology from a gentleman’s hobby into a professional occupation in which many found work in the British Empire.
Mary Anning, meanwhile, remains a figure of pity and awe. In The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Fowles wrote: ‘one of the meanest disgraces of British palaeontology is that though many scientists of the day gratefully used her finds to establish their own reputation, not one native type bears the name anningii’.12
Her most fitting memorial, however, is De la Beche’s masterpiece, Duria Antiquior, depicting as if alive every creature she was the first to discover.
8
DINOSAUR WARS
It is a wonder that one of the earliest and ablest geologists found time to hammer the rocks. Gideon Algernon Mantell, a country doctor born in Lewes, Sussex in 1790, was devoted to exploring the fossil-filled strata of England’s South Downs. Even so, his primary activity (to judge from his vivid personal journal) was bloodletting.
If geology was a new science when he began, medicine was an old one, reliant on techniques that make painful reading today. In 1818 James Moore, the Lewes surgeon and general practitioner to whom Mantell was apprenticed, suffered ‘a most severe fit of Apoplexy’. Immediately, Mantell made ‘a large orifice in a vein and took away forty ounces of blood’.1 He then applied leeches. Three days later Moore was still having convulsions: ‘I resolved to bleed him again as the dernier resort. I took from him 20 ounces; whilst the blood was flowing he muttered out “better Mantell, better”: this induced me not to stop the bleeding till his pulse faltered; he amended from that very minute.’2
Despite the treatment, Moore recovered with no more lasting effect than a lisp from the loss of two front teeth. Mantell bought the practice from him that year. Moore, like many physicians of the time, was not only a certified obstetrician and surgeon but also an apothecary – a vocation that led him, like Mantell, to an appreciation of the medicinal properties of minerals and fossils to be found in the earth.
In 1811, with some money left to him by his father, Mantell went to London for medical training at the Royal College of Surgeons, and later qualified as a surgeon and obstetrician. While he was in London, his interest in fossils was encouraged by an older doctor with a similar obsession. James Parkinson, the distinguished surgeon of St Bartholomew’s Hospital, began acquiring fossils around 1798. Parkinson, an early member of the Geological Societ
y, put his knowledge into a large book, Organic Remains of a Former World. Its very title shows the revolution in thought that fossil awareness had brought to the early nineteenth century. Thanks to Parkinson, Mantell became one of the first to appreciate the significance of William Smith’s great 1815 map based on stratigraphical sequences across England.
That same year, Mantell achieved his first published work (even if only in a local newspaper). He called it ‘On the Extraneous Fossils found in the Neighbourhood of Lewes’.3 For the same newspaper he wrote a letter on vaccination which was widely noticed. Gradually he accumulated an outstanding fossil collection, in part by buying from a London dealer. He became well acquainted with the work in France of Baron Cuvier and his colleague, Alexandre Brongniart, who had found the remains of large animals in the environs of Paris. Mantell turned himself into an expert on bones – human and animal – with a fascination akin to Cuvier’s for parts and their conjoining. Like De la Beche, he also had a gift for drawing.
Back in Lewes after his London training, Mantell attempted to devote himself to the project in which his heart lay – a book ‘on the Geological structure of this County’. It was published in 1822 with the better title The Fossils of the South Downs. Yet almost every day of his life, geology was pushed aside by medical practice, particularly obstetrics; he delivered anything between 200 and 300 babies a year.
Reading the Rocks Page 9