Portrait of Mary Anning with her dog Tray and the Golden Cap outcrop in the background, Natural History Museum, London. This painting was owned by her brother Joseph and presented to the museum in 1935 by Miss Annette Anning.
Gallery of Mary Anning
Lyme Regis, Dorset, United Kingdom
Sketch of Mary Anning at work by Henry De la Beche.
Portrait of Mary Anning with her dog Tray and the Golden Cap outcrop in the background, Natural History Museum, London. This painting was owned by her brother Joseph and presented to the museum in 1935 by Miss Annette Anning.
Mary Anning was a prolific English fossil hunter and amateur anatomist. She is credited with the discovery of several dinosaur specimens that assisted in the early development of paleontology. Her excavations also aided the careers of many British scientists by providing them with specimens to study and framed a significant part of Earth’s geologic history.
Background
Mary Anning was born on May 21, 1799, in Lyme Regis, Dorset, United Kingdom. She was one of two surviving children born to a cabinetmaker and amateur fossil collector Richard Anning and his wife, Mary Moore. The family relied on the sale of fossils collected from seaside cliffs near their home along England’s Channel coast as a source of income. Richard Anning was not the only townsperson to sell collected fossils, but he did interest his whole family in the enterprise, including a daughter. Anning and her mother developed a reputation for being effective negotiators with those who wanted to buy their specimens. After Richard’s death in 1810, the family mainly relied on charity. Mary, her brother, Joseph, and their mother, who were skilled fossil collectors themselves, supplemented their meager resources by selling fossils of invertebrates, such as ammonoids and belemnoids, to collectors and scholars. By this time, Anning's contributions and skills were being recognized by those in the field. Her brother Joseph was already working as an apprentice to an upholsterer, so the burden of providing an income for the family fell to Anning and her mother. In 1817 the fossils attracted the attention of British fossil collector Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Birch, who assisted the family financially by purchasing a number of specimens. Later he auctioned off his collection and donated the proceeds to the Anning family during a particularly desperate period in their lives.
Education
Anning had only a limited education, perhaps only a few years in a parish school, but she learned much about the business and the fossils from her father. She was able to read, however, and taught herself geology, anatomy, paleontology, and scientific illustration.
Career
Over the course of her life, Anning discovered the remains of several large vertebrates embedded in the cliffs of Lyme Regis. The cliffs, which date from the late Triassic to early Jurassic periods (some 229 million to 176 million years ago), a time when the area was submerged and located closer to the Equator, contain the fossil-rich limestone and shale of the Blue Lias Formation. In 1810 her brother found the first known Ichthyosaurus specimen; however, she was the one who excavated it, and some sources also give her credit for the discovery. British physician Everard Home described the specimen shortly thereafter in a series of papers. Her most famous find occurred in 1824 when she uncovered the first intact Plesiosaurus skeleton. The specimen was so large and well preserved that it attracted the attention of French zoologist Georges Cuvier, who doubted the finding until he saw the drawings of the specimen in a paper by English geologist and paleontologist William Daniel Conybeare. After Cuvier authenticated the discovery, the scientific community began to recognize the paleontological value of the fossils recovered by Mary Anning and her family.
News of Anning’s fossil excavations made her a celebrity and prompted paleontologists, collectors, and tourists to descend on Lyme Regis to buy from her. She went on to recover additional Ichthyosaurus and plesiosaur skeletons from the cliffs. She uncovered a pterosaur in 1828, which became known as Pterodactylus (or Dimorphodon) macronyx. It was the first pterosaur specimen found outside Germany. In 1829 she excavated the skeleton of Squaloraja, a fossil fish thought to be a member of a transition group between sharks and rays.
Despite her lack of formal scientific training, Anning's discoveries, local area knowledge, and skill at classifying fossils in the field earned her a reputation among paleontology’s male and largely upper-class ranks. Her later hunting expeditions sometimes included famous scientists of the time, including British geologist and minister William Buckland and British anatomist and paleontologist Richard Owen, who proposed the term Dinosauria in 1842. She also corresponded with and sold fossils to other leading scientists, such as Cuvier and English geologist Adam Sedgwick.
Nevertheless, Anning was not given full credit for many of the fossils she excavated. Collectors donating specimens to institutions tended to be credited with their discovery. Of the many specimens, she found and recovered, several were described in prestigious journals without even a mention of her name. However, some famous scientists of the time, such as British geologist Henry De la Beche and British paleontologist Gideon Mantell, did credit her in their work.
Toward the end of her life, Anning collected annuities from the British Association for the Advancement of Science and the Geological Society of London, which were set up in recognition of her contributions to science.
(Letter and drawing from Mary Anning announcing the discov...)
1823
Religion
The Anning family were religious dissenters - Protestants who separated from the Church of England. Anning eventually converted to the Church of England - a practical decision since many of her customers were Anglican, but the move was probably motivated by genuine faith, too.
Politics
Mary Anning wasn't a political person and dedicated her life to finding and studying fossils.
Views
Anning’s views on the flood and the disparate theories of the male scientists of her era are not known. But in 1833, she was visited by a tourist, the Reverend Henry Rawlins, and his six-year-old son, Frank. Rawlins believed that God created the world within a week, but Anning described to young Frank how the fossils purchased by his father had been found by her at all different levels in the cliffs, explaining that this meant the creatures possibly had been created and had lived at different times. According to Frank’s journals, his father refused to discuss the issue after they left Anning’s home.
Personality
Anning had a shrewd business sense and came to know her market well.
Physical Characteristics:
Anning died in her 40s of breast cancer, and likely spent much of the last months of her life bedridden.
Quotes from others about the person
"She [Anning] says the world has used her ill. These 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." - Anna Pinney, a woman who sometimes accompanied Anning while she collected the fossils
"Miss Philpot and Mary Anning have been able to show me with utter certainty which are the ichthyodorulite's dorsal fins of sharks that correspond to different types." - Louis Agassiz, Swiss paleontologist
Connections
Mary Anning was never married and the only immediate family left was her brother and his wife, Amelia.