Mary Anning's Curiosity

by Monica Kulling

  The limestone slabs were cemented into another frame built by Joe, and Mary added a skim of lime plaster to set the bones and make the finish appear smooth. The beast was ready.

  Mary stood back to admire her work. The large creature had paddles instead of legs, and its tail had an odd little kink in it. It was thirty feet long from the tip of its snout to the end of its tail. It lay across the workshop, through the hall and partway into the kitchen.

  Molly was looking forward to having the creature gone.

  “Your pa would be so proud of you, Mary,” she said, on the day Lord Henley was to pick it up. “To think, a mere lass, with little schooling, did what those great scientists do all the time — and all of them big men, mind. It boggles my mind, it does. I can’t help but wonder what else you are destined to do.”

  “I agree with your mother,” added Miss Philpot, who’d come over to see the fossil off. “You have what it takes to find many more such wonderful creatures.”

  The squire pulled up his rack-bed wagon, which was used for hauling heavy loads.

  “Ace and Abby are the only horses strong enough to pull this weight,” he said once the Day brothers and Joe had managed to wrangle the beast on board.

  “Here’s your money, Molly, minus the rent you owe me,” said Lord Henley, giving Molly a wad of large banknotes. “You did fine work, Mary. Keep me in mind should you find another beastie.”

  With a tip of his hat, the squire was gone, and with him Mary’s curiosity.

  Through the many months of hard work, Mary had come to call the creature her own, and now it was gone. Her heart felt empty and sad at its loss.

  “There are no other beasties to be found,” she murmured sadly.

  “You can’t know that for certain, Mary,” said Miss Philpot. “There may be many, many more. We live in a world filled with mystery.”

  Mary smiled. Of that she was certain.

  Author’s Note

  More about Mary Anning

  Mary Anning was born with a natural scientific curiosity and an uncanny talent for finding fossils. As a child, she followed her father onto the seashore and quickly learned from him how to find, collect and excavate curiosities, which was another word used to describe fossils. As Mary grew, so did her passion for collecting fossils. It became her life’s work.

  Mary Anning made many major discoveries. She was the first person to collect, display and correctly identify ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs and pterosaurs. Mary’s fossil finds forced geologists (the word “paleontology” wasn’t in use until 1822) to revise their theories about the Earth’s age. Years after Mary was gone, Charles Darwin proposed his own theories in his book On the Origin of Species, which was published in 1859. He used Mary’s fossilized creatures as evidence that living beings change or evolve over millions of years.

  Mary’s first major discovery was the ichthyosaur, whose unearthing is described in this story. The creature was dolphin-like in shape and ranged in size from 15 to 30 feet (4.5 to 9 m). Ichthyosaurs had big eyes, sharp teeth, four fins and fish-like tails. They breathed in air with lungs and gave birth in water to live young. We know this about them from the fossilized bones of baby ichthyosaurs that have been found inside the bones of adults.

  In 1823, Mary uncovered the first complete Plesiosaurus (“near lizard”). This reptile was nine feet long, with a broad body and a short tail. It was also a marine reptile. It used its four pointed flippers, shaped like paddles, to swim in the ancient sea. Plesiosaurs were among the first fossil vertebrates to be described by science. And Mary Anning was responsible for finding them.

  In 1828, Mary found a nearly complete specimen of a pterosaur, or “winged lizard,” which lived 66 to 228 million years ago. The pterosaur was a flying reptile related to the dinosaur. Pterosaurs were the first animals, after insects, to fly using wing power. They evolved into dozens of species — from those as small as paper planes to those as large as fighter jets. When Mary made the discovery, the headlines at the time announced that she had found the bones of a “flying dragon.”

  One of Mary’s most intriguing puzzles concerned the fossilized clumps she frequently found. Collectors called them “bezoar stones.” They were found in the abdominal region of ichthyosaur skeletons. Mary’s curiosity once again sparked her desire to find out what these fossil clumps could be. She broke one open. Inside, there were fossilized fish bones and scales, as well as the bones of smaller ichthyosaurs. Mary’s astute observations led the geologist William Buckland to conclude that bezoar stones were, in fact, fossilized feces. Buckland named them “coprolites,” meaning dung stones.

  Buckland also suspected that the spiral markings on the fossils proved that ichthyosaurs had spiral ridges in their intestines that were similar to those of modern sharks. It was Mary Anning’s discoveries and observations that helped geologists like William Buckland come to a better understanding of many prehistoric creatures.

  By the time Mary died at age forty-seven from breast cancer, she was known in geological circles in Europe and America. However, because she was a woman, Mary was never allowed to join the Geological Society of London. Nor was she always given full credit for her scientific contributions.

  Even so, Mary Anning’s discoveries have contributed to our knowledge and understanding of prehistoric life. In 2010, the Royal Society of London named Mary Anning one of ten British women who have most influenced the history of science. Not bad for someone with so little schooling!

  What Is a Fossil?

  Fossils are the skeletons of animals, plants, fungi and single-celled living things that have been preserved over millions of years. There are two types of fossils — body fossils and trace fossils. A body fossil is the fossilized body of a once-living creature. A trace fossil is the impression a creature has left in the sediment by its activities — for example, footprints, tracks, fossilized eggshells, nests or burrows.

  In this book, Mary and the other fossil hunters uncover many kinds of body fossils. Ammonites were free-swimming mollusks living around the same time that the dinosaurs walked the Earth and disappearing during the same extinction event. They ranged in size from tiny species measuring less than an inch (2 cm) across to large ones reaching over 6 feet (2 m) in diameter. They had big heads, large eyes and tentacles. They were animals without backbones similar to our modern-day squid, cuttlefish and octopus.

  People thought the coil-shaped shelled creatures were coiled snakes turned to rock. That is why they were often called “snakestones,” when they weren’t being called “ammos.” The name “ammonite” comes from the ancient Greeks. They believed the shells looked like the horns of a ram, so they named them after the Egyptian god Amun or Amon, because he was often shown wearing ram’s horns.

  Belemnites, like ammonites, belong to the group known as cephalopods. They were called “bellies,” “ladies’ fingers” or “thunderbolts” because people once believed that these fossils came from the heavens during thunderstorms. Belemnites were similar to the modern squid in the way they moved through water. Also, when under threat, they would squirt a cloud of ink in the water.

  Verteberries or crocodile teeth were believed to come from crocodiles, but were actually the six-sided vertebrae of an ichthyosaur, as Mary would learn once she’d uncovered her great croc.

  Devil’s toenails or gryphies were a fossil bivalve related to the living oyster, scientifically called Gryphaea.

  Brittle stars were spiny-skinned creatures like starfish and sea urchins. The crinoids, cousins to brittle stars, look like beautiful plants when fossilized. They were called “sea lilies.”

  What Happened to Mary’s Monster?

  Lord Henry Hoste Henley paid the Annings 23 pounds sterling for the fossil that everyone thought was a giant crocodile. That doesn’t sound like much, but in the 1800s it was more money than the Annings had ever seen at one time. It made a dent in Richard Anning’s debt, a
s well as put food on the table.

  But Lord Henley wasn’t honest. He didn’t add Mary’s fossil to his collection. Once he owned it, he turned around and sold the croc for a profit to William Bullock’s Museum of Natural Curiosities in London. William Bullock dressed the fossil in a vest and placed a monocle over its eye. A sign pinned to the vest read “Crocodile in a Fossil State.” Mary’s magnificent creature was nothing more than a freak in a freak show. And no one thought more of it than that.

  On a visit to London to visit her brother, Elizabeth Philpot saw Mary’s “crocodile.” She was shocked and saddened to see the colossal creature that had once prowled an ancient sea made to look so ordinary and foolish. Mary was hurt and angry when Elizabeth told her about it. All her months of hard work hardly seemed worth it.

  Then, in 1817, the fossil was sold once more, but this time to the British Museum (Natural History). Off came the vest! The monocle was thrown into the trash. Mary’s sea monster was given a proper scientific name — Ichthyosaurus, which in Greek means “fish lizard.”

  Ichthyosaurs evolved from being “fish lizards” with fins into a streamlined fish-like form and remained at the top of the food chain until they were replaced by plesiosaurs. The identification of this predatory marine reptile opened up a new way of thinking about the age of the Earth, about evolution and extinction.

  The Seashell Song

  She sells seashells on the seashore.

  The shells she sells are seashells, I’m sure.

  For if she sells seashells on the seashore,

  Then I’m sure she sells seashore shells.

  We all know this little rhyme, but did you know that many think Mary Anning may have been the inspiration for it? In 1908 Terry Sullivan wrote the words and Harry Gifford the music for this song that was sung onstage in what was then called pantomime. Terry Sullivan most likely visited the seaside town and heard the story of the girl who found fossils in cliffs and seashells just by walking on the beach.

  The Jurassic Coast Today

  Today the cliffs and shore where the Anning family hunted for fossils is a World Heritage site. The layers of sedimentary rock in the cliffs along the Jurassic Coast are, as they say, “a walk through time.” They reveal the Earth’s evolution across 185 million years and form a near-complete record of the Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous periods. The 95-mile stretch of coast — between Exmouth in East Devon and Studland Bay in Dorset — is a favorite among tourists, as it was in Mary’s day. It attracts those who love the hunt or who simply wish to learn more about the famous fossil finder.

  The Lyme Regis Museum

  The Lyme Regis Museum stands on the spot where Mary Anning’s childhood home once stood. In 2011, Mary Anning’s famous ichthyosaur returned to Lyme Regis on the 200th anniversary of its discovery. Folks got a chance to see Mary’s curiosity up close in the setting in which it was found. A few months later, the fossil was returned to the Natural History Museum in London, where it is still displayed.

  Mary Anning’s Fossil Shop

  Most of the events in this story happened as I have described them, although I have taken a liberty with the timeline. Mary was twenty-seven years old when she set up a shop in the house she bought for her mother and herself. For the sake of my story, however, I opened the shop some years earlier.

  Molly Anning’s Children

  I chose not to include Mary’s younger siblings in this story, partly because not one of them lived to adulthood and partly because I wanted to focus on the relationship Mary had with her older brother, Joseph, who was instrumental in finding the eye of the skull. Richard and Molly Anning had as many as ten children, but most died of disease. Their first-born, also named Mary, died at age four when her clothes caught fire. Mary was named for her. Joseph and Mary lived to become adults, which was something of a miracle in those days.

  For Further Reading

  These books made researching Mary Anning and her world interesting and fun.

  Curiosity by Joan Thomas. McClelland & Stewart Ltd., 2010.

  The Dinosaur Hunters: A True Story of Scientific Rivalry and the Discovery of the Prehistoric World by Deborah Cadbury. Original publication Fourth Estate, 2000. HarperCollins Publishers, 2010.

  The Fossil Hunter: Dinosaurs, Evolution, and the Woman Whose Discoveries Changed the World by Shelley Emling. St. Martin’s Press, 2009.

  Jurassic Mary: Mary Anning and the Primeval Monsters by Patricia Pierce. Original publication 2006. The History Press, 2015.

  Remarkable Creatures by Tracy Chevalier. Dutton, 2010.

  Selected Books for Young Readers

  Finding Wonders: Three Girls Who Changed Science by Jeannine Atkins. Atheneum Books for Young Readers, 2016.

  Mary Anning: Fossil Hunter by Sally M. Walker, illustrated by Phyllis V. Saroff. Carolrhoda Books, Inc., 2001.

  Rare Treasure: Mary Anning and Her Remarkable Discoveries by Don Brown. Original publication 1999. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Books for Young Readers, 2003.

  Stone Girl, Bone Girl: The Story of Mary Anning by Laurence Anholt, illustrated by Sheila Moxley. Original publication Orchard Books, 1999. Frances Lincoln Children’s Books, 2006.

  Acknowledgments

  Thank you, Sheila Barry, for your encouragement and editorial wisdom. They mean the world to me. Thanks also to the terrific Groundwood team — Michael, Nan and Emma — for their expertise; and to the amazing Melissa Castrillon who created the magical cover and interior art. And, as always, thank you, Nancy!

  This project received a Writers’ Reserve grant from the Ontario Arts Council, for which I am grateful.

  MONICA KULLING is the author of more than fifty books for children. Her most recent book is On Our Way to Oyster Bay: Mother Jones and Her March for Children’s Rights, illustrated by Felicita Sala. She has also written the popular Great Idea series, including Spic-and-Span! Lillian Gilbreth’s Wonder Kitchen, which won the Flicker Tale Award given by the North Dakota Library Association. Monica’s books have been nominated for many other awards, including the Norma Fleck Award for Canadian Children’s Non-Fiction. Among her recent picture books are Happy Birthday, Alice Babette; Grant and Tillie Go Walking and The Tweedles Go Electric. Monica lives in Toronto.

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