Mary Anning: The Fossil Hunter Who Changed Science

Born in Lyme Regis in 1799, Mary Anning spent her life working the cliffs below the town and made discoveries that fundamentally reshaped our understanding of prehistoric life. Her story is one of the most remarkable in British science.

The cliffs that line the shore between Lyme Regis and Charmouth are layered with time. Dark bands of shale and pale limestone, laid down on the bed of a warm shallow sea some 180 to 200 million years ago, erode steadily into the beach below. It was from these cliffs that Mary Anning earned her living — and in doing so, provided the raw material that would eventually shake the Victorian world’s understanding of the age and nature of the Earth.

Anning was born on the 21st of May 1799, the daughter of Richard Anning, a cabinet maker and amateur fossil collector who supplemented the family income by selling “curiosities” to tourists visiting the newly fashionable seaside town. Richard died of tuberculosis in 1810, leaving the family in poverty. Mary, then eleven years old, took over the fossil trade that her father had begun. She would spend the rest of her life doing it.

The ichthyosaur that started everything

The year after her father’s death, Mary and her brother Joseph found the skull of a large creature protruding from the cliff face near Black Ven, the great dark headland east of the town. Mary returned over the following weeks to excavate the rest of the skeleton. When it was finally freed from the rock, it was around five and a half metres long, with a long snout full of sharp teeth and enormous eye sockets. Nothing like it had been described before.

The specimen was eventually purchased by a local collector and later sold to the British Museum. It was initially thought to be a crocodile, then a sea-lizard, before scientists settled on a new name: Ichthyosaurus, meaning fish-lizard. It was the first ichthyosaur skeleton to be correctly identified and described by science. Mary Anning was twelve years old when she dug it out of the cliff.

Further discoveries and their significance

Over the following decades, Anning continued to find specimens that no one had seen before. In 1823 she found the first complete plesiosaur skeleton ever discovered, a creature so strange — a broad flat body with four large flippers and a neck that accounted for almost half its total length — that the palaeontologist William Conybeare initially suspected a forgery. It was not; it was simply an animal unlike anything science had previously encountered.

In 1828 she found the first pterosaur skeleton discovered in Britain, which she identified correctly as a flying reptile despite having received almost no formal scientific education. That same decade she also found examples of coprolites — fossilised faeces — and worked out what they were, enabling scientists to study what ancient creatures actually ate. Each discovery added to a growing body of evidence that the world had once been inhabited by creatures quite unlike anything alive today, a concept that still carried real intellectual danger in an era when the biblical account of creation was taken literally by most educated people.

Recognition withheld and recognition eventually given

Anning’s position in the scientific world of her time was complicated by her class and her sex. The gentlemen scientists who formed the Geological Society of London could not formally admit women as members until 1904, and Anning — who was from a working-class family and had no university education — would have been doubly excluded. The men who purchased her specimens and published descriptions of them did not always credit her contribution adequately, though some, like the geologist William Buckland, acknowledged her skills openly and referred visiting scientists to her door.

She died of breast cancer in March 1847 at the age of forty-seven. In the year before her death, the Geological Society made a rare exception and paid for her medical treatment, and it published an obituary written by Buckland. Her story was well known locally, but it took more than a century for her reputation to reach the wider public it deserved. A portrait of her now hangs in the Natural History Museum, and the museum holds many of the specimens she found. In 2010, the Royal Society named her one of the ten British women who had most influenced the history of science.

Where to find her story in Lyme Regis

The town is proud of its connection to Mary Anning and has taken care to mark it. The Lyme Regis Museum, built on the site of the Anning family home, has a permanent exhibition dedicated to her life and work, including replica tools and contextual material about the geology of the local cliffs. Her name appears on a stained-glass window in St Michael’s Church, which overlooks the town from the hillside above the Cobb.

The beach between the town and Charmouth remains one of the best places in Britain to find ammonites and other fossils, particularly after winter storms have brought fresh material down from the cliffs. The Lyme Regis Museum runs guided fossil walks led by experienced volunteers, and several local businesses offer fossil-hunting tours along the same stretches of shore that Anning herself worked. If you find something interesting, the museum can help with identification.

A legacy that outlasted its time

What makes Anning’s life so striking, more than a century and a half after her death, is the combination of personal tenacity and intellectual acuity she brought to work that no one around her was prepared to fully credit. She read every scientific paper she could obtain, corresponded with leading geologists, and understood the creatures she was finding at a level that matched or exceeded many of the men who later published about them. She did all of this while earning a living from the proceeds, negotiating with dealers, managing difficult customers, and coping with the poverty that shadowed her family throughout her life.

Lyme Regis would be a remarkable place without her. With her, it is a place where one of the great overlooked stories of British science played out on a stretch of cold Dorset beach, hammer in hand, against a cliff face that had been building for two hundred million years.