Fossils and the history of rocks

Painting of a prehistoric sea in which long-necked, pointed-snouted marine reptiles swim and chase one another, beneath cliffs and pterosaurs. — “Duria Antiquior”, a watercolour by the geologist Henry De la Beche (1830) imagining life in ancient Dorset, based on the fossils found by Mary Anning. Henry De la Beche (10 February 1796 – 13 April 1855), Public domain, source

In 2022, a statue was unveiled in Lyme Regis, on the English coast, after a campaign led by an eleven-year-old girl.¹

She wanted Mary Anning to be recognised at last.

What remains to be understood is why it took two centuries.

First, the material circumstances

Mary Anning’s father was a carpenter. He supplemented his income by selling tourists the fossils that eroded out of the cliffs of Lyme Regis.²

He died in 1810. Mary was eleven.

Without this fossil trade and without charity, the family would have gone hungry.

She did not look for fossils out of scientific curiosity: she looked for them to make a living. She became one of the best in the world at this trade.

The first ichthyosaur (1811)

At around twelve, she found in a cliff the rest of a skeleton, the first part of which her brother Joseph had found a year earlier. She then spent months, alone, extracting a skeleton more than five metres long.³

It was an ichthyosaur — a marine reptile resembling a dolphin.

As early as 1699, a scholar had drawn fossils that probably came from an ichthyosaur, but he had taken them for the remains of fish. Mary Anning’s find was the first specimen recognised by science as a marine reptile, and the first to be described scientifically. That is the difference between finding an object and understanding what it is.⁴

This fossil was described and published by the scholar Everard Home. Nowhere in his original writings does he mention Mary Anning.⁵

The plesiosaur and the scientific break (1823)

In December 1823, she uncovered the first complete plesiosaur skeleton — a marine reptile with a very long neck. In December 1828, she would also discover the first pterosaur outside Germany.⁶

Why the plesiosaur changed everything

When the fossil of an unknown animal was found, the usual explanation was: this species still lives somewhere, in an unexplored region. The world was vast, and many lands remained unknown.

The plesiosaur made this explanation untenable. It was so different from any living animal that it was no longer possible to imagine a herd hidden away somewhere.

Extinction was becoming impossible to deny. Cuvier had only just introduced this idea, and Darwin would not publish On the Origin of Species until thirty-six years later.

Reading the layers and dating the rocks

Mary Anning’s discoveries were not only about strange animals: they provided the keys to reading the Earth’s memory.

Stratigraphy in action

Lyme Regis is part of the Jurassic Coast. Its cliffs are made up of a strict alternation of layers of limestone and marl, deposited over millions of years.

Anning did not extract fossils at random: she had learned to associate each species with a precise stratigraphic level.

The principle of superposition: Lower layers are older than upper layers.
Index fossils: By observing that certain ammonites and certain reptiles appeared only in specific strata, Anning and her contemporaries made it possible to correlate the age of rocks from one region to another.

The discovery of coprolites

While examining skeletons, she noticed lumpy stones in the abdominal region. She broke them open and found fish bones and scales inside. She deduced that they were fossilised excrement.

She reported this to the geologist William Buckland, who gave them their scientific name: coprolites. These fossils paved the way for reconstructing the food chains and palaeoenvironments of the Jurassic.

The mechanics of erasure

The erasure of Mary Anning was not a coordinated conspiracy, but the product of an accumulation of institutional mechanisms.

The initial dispute: The animal is so strange that Georges Cuvier, the most influential scientist of his day, thinks it is a fake, or two animals put together.
Exclusion from the debates: A meeting of the Geological Society of London, on 20 February 1824, is devoted to the animal. Mary Anning is not invited.
The appropriation of the work: A colleague presents Mary Anning’s drawings there. Cuvier is convinced and acknowledges his mistake, but Anning’s name is not mentioned.
The commercialisation of science: because she sells her finds to make a living, she is classed as a supplier and not as a colleague. In her lifetime, no British palaeontologist names a species after her: only the Swiss Louis Agassiz does so, for two fossil fish.⁷

One counter-example, however, rules out treating this as inevitable. Not all the scholars of the time erased Mary Anning: in publishing his work on coprolites, William Buckland takes care to credit her by name and to praise the precision of her observations. Scientific credit was therefore possible. The erasure was not a custom of the time that no one could escape: it was a choice of academic practice.⁸

The material proof of the erasure

A historian of science has shown how this erasure can be measured, and his method is open to anyone.

To find out whether someone mattered in Victorian England, one consults the great national biographical dictionary. Mary Anning does indeed appear in it.⁹

But not in the dictionary. In its supplement.

This supplement, published in 1901, bore an explicit title: it gathered the “accidental omissions” and “people overlooked” in the main work.¹⁰

This is a material trace: it is not a matter of debating an impression, but of opening a volume and seeing under which heading she appears.

As for the epithet by which she is known today — “the greatest fossilist the world ever knew” — it comes from no official tribute: it is a handwritten annotation found on a North American document.¹¹

Nor is the story closed: fossils found and sold by her are still unidentified in today’s museums. Their labels often bear the name of the donor, not hers.¹²

Three accumulated obstacles

She was a woman — excluded from the official scientific community.
She was poor — forced to sell her specimens to eat.
She lived far from London — away from the places of power and decision-making.

Each of the rules seemed neutral. Together, they produced a systematic erasure.

Chronology of an opening: the truth about the dates

There is frequent confusion about the admission of women to the Geological Society of London. The exact date of admission is 21 May 1919, that is, 112 years after the founding of the society and 72 years after Anning’s death (in 1847).

On that day, eight women were elected at once.¹³

The method used is revealing. The statutes were not rewritten: an interpretative sentence was added to them. In the interpretation of these Bye-Laws words in the masculine gender only, shall include the feminine gender also.¹⁴

A simple grammatical note, and a century of refusal falls away.

The two other dates often cited correspond to intermediate stages:

1904: A woman is allowed for the first time to attend the reading of her own paper. (Present, but not a member.)
1908: A motion proposes to declare “that it is desirable that women should be admitted”. An advisory poll comes out in favour of it (342 votes out of 477). In 1909, however, it is rejected at a general meeting (50 votes to 40).¹⁵

It was a British law passed in 1918, on the representation of the people, that accelerated the opening of the Geological Society: in December 1918, its Council instructed a committee to find the quickest way to admit women.¹⁶

The Lyme Regis network: she was not alone

History has remembered Mary Anning as an isolated figure, but she moved within a local ecosystem.

The Philpot sisters (Mary, Margaret and Elizabeth), well-off women who had also settled in Lyme Regis, assembled a major collection of fossils. They worked in close collaboration with Anning, sharing observations, preparation techniques and a network of scholarly contacts.¹⁷

This female network on the Jurassic Coast was one of the invisible pillars of British palaeontology in the early nineteenth century.

Note 1

In 2022, a statue was unveiled of Mary and her dog in Lyme Regis after a campaign by 11-year-old Evie Swire, who was determined to see her hero recognised.

Natural History Museum (Londres), “Mary Anning: The Unsung Hero of Fossil Discovery”