Science
1799 to 1847, Lyme Regis, England
The self-taught fossilist whose Lyme Regis discoveries gave the new sciences of extinction and deep time their hardest evidence: whole vanished creatures from an ancient sea.
Start learning Mary →The Lyme Regis find of 1811 to 1812 - how a self-taught girl and her brother recovered from the cliffs a creature that matched no living thing, and how reading a whole articulated skeleton, bone by bone, became the foun…
The near-complete plesiosaur Anning found in 1823 was so strange that Georges Cuvier, the greatest anatomist in Europe, suspected a forgery - until he examined it, conceded his error, and helped make it famous. The spec…
Anning’s discoveries were not just strange animals; they were evidence about the age and history of the Earth. Whole vanished faunas implied an Earth immeasurably older than the traditional few thousand years, and…
Anning noticed that the ‘bezoar stones’ in her reptiles’ bellies were fossilized dung, full of fish scales and bones. From these humblest of fossils she and Buckland reconstructed diet, digestion, and…
Anning was poor, self-taught, a woman, and a religious Dissenter - barred from the universities and the scientific society that debated her finds. She dissected, drew, and understood specimens that gentlemen named and p…
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