Steve Etches is the latest in a long line of enthusiasts and, as we have seen, the majority of practitioners of practical palæontology were never formally trained in the discipline. The Dorset shore where Kimmeridge lies has long been known as the ‘Jurassic Coast’ and it extends from Exmouth in East Devon to Studland Bay, near Poole in Dorset, a distance of 100 miles (160 km). It is near the middle of this coast that you will find Lyme Regis, known for its beaches and seaside views, and still a popular venue for fossil collectors. For centuries people have taken home fragments of rock with strange skeletal structures embedded in the surface or marked with the remains of peculiar shells. As interest in studying the natural world began to grow in the nineteenth century, families such as the Annings established businesses collecting fossils they could sell on to enthusiasts. The petrified specimens were originally advertised as thunderbolts or devil’s fingers (belemnites), snake-stones (ammonites) and verteberries (vertebræ). Demand had steadily increased since 1792, as tourism to the south coast of Britain increased when the French revolutionary wars made travel to the continent unsafe. The ancient city of Bath first became a magnet for Georgian tourists, but as visitors were sold the idea of immersion in water rich in minerals, bathing in the sea began to increase in popularity. Bathing machines – little sheds on wheels – sprang up along the coast, from which holidaymakers could demurely emerge and lower themselves into the edge of the ocean. The visitors sought souvenirs, and collecting fossils from the beach became an increasingly popular option, just as enthusiasts had done for centuries.
Among those early collectors was Lieutenant Colonel Thomas James Birch, who used to visit Lyme from his home in Lincolnshire. On a visit in 1820, he became aware that the Annings were in need of money, and he resolved publicly to auction all his fossil collection to help them. Having made no major discoveries for a year, the Annings were at the point of having to sell their furniture to pay the rent. The auction sale at Bullocks auction room in Wareham became a three-day event, with buyers coming from Vienna and Paris, and it raised £400 (over £23,000 or $27,000 today). Mary Anning had become renowned for her expertise and she was mentioned in the media. The Bristol Mirror in 1823 reported:
This persevering female has for years gone daily in search of fossil remains of importance at every tide, for many miles under the hanging cliffs at Lyme, whose fallen masses are her immediate object, as they alone contain these valuable relics of a former world, which must be snatched at the moment of their fall, at the continual risk of being crushed by the half suspended fragments they leave behind, or be left to be destroyed by the returning tide: – to her exertions we owe nearly all the fine specimens of Ichthyosauri of the great collections.
Similarly, the widow of the former Recorder of the City of London, Lady Harriet Silvester, wrote in her diary in 1824:
The extraordinary thing in this young woman is that she has made herself so thoroughly acquainted with the science that the moment she finds any bones she knows to what tribe they belong. She fixes the bones on a frame with cement and then makes drawings and has them engraved. It is certainly a wonderful instance of divine favour – that this poor, ignorant girl should be so blessed, for by reading and application she has arrived to that degree of knowledge as to be in the habit of writing and talking with professors and other clever men on the subject, and they all acknowledge that she understands more of the science than anyone else in this kingdom.
According to an account in The Dragon Seekers, a visiting collector once wrote:
I once gladly availed myself of a geological excursion with Mary Anning and was not a little surprised at her geological tact and acumen. A single glance at the edge of a fossil peeping from the Blue Lias, revealed to her the nature of the fossil and its name and character were instantly announced.37
Mary Anning was a remarkable young woman. It has been claimed that she was the inspiration for the popular tongue-twister: ‘She sells seashells by the seashore’, though Shelley Emmling, who investigated the legend, says this did not appear in print until Terry Sullivan incorporated it into a lyric he published in 1908, so that widely believed origin may be mistaken.38
Mary Anning was not just a fossil collector, or a dealer; she seriously studied what she found and used considerable ingenuity in comparing her fossils with living creatures. She noted that sepia is a brownish ink extracted from present-day cuttlefish, and so – finding fossils of similar animals bearing the traces of fossilized ink-sacs – she made her own ink from the fossils and demonstrated that it could be used in much the same way. When she found fossilized fish, she dissected fresh fish to seek anatomical comparisons. Her diligence and accuracy outshone the work of many professional palæontologists. Among the skeletons that she used to find were the remains of creatures that looked a little like dolphins. These were popularly known as sea dragons or crocodiles. One of her specimens was almost complete and it was inspected by the anatomist and surgeon, Everard Home, an unscrupulous investigator who was responsible for the loss of the Royal Society’s collection of microscopes made by the pioneering microbiologist Antony van Leeuwenhoek. Home also took away the anatomical studies written by John Hunter and began publishing them as his own. Home had worked with Edward Jenner on vaccination, and had bribed the burial party of the Irish giant Charles Byrne, who measured 7 feet 7 in (2.31 metres), having them put rocks into Byrne’s coffin while taking the corpse for Home to study. Even so, Home was cultivating a reputation for being a leading anatomist and he was more than willing to inspect Anning’s latest fossil. Initially, he declared it to be a crocodile; then he changed his mind and decided it was a fish. A year or so later he was saying it was a specimen of a creature that was halfway between fish and crocodiles, and then changed his mind again, deciding it was an amphibian lying between salamanders and lizards. Home was a capricious and devious character, and his personality resonated throughout his work.
Mary Anning was a student of her subject, and not just a fossil hunter. Many of her finds became popular souvenirs, and this Plesiosaurus skeleton, carefully excavated by Anning in 1823, was prepared as a lithograph by Thomas Webster.
By 1826, six years after the Anning family had been rescued from penury by Birch, Mary had saved just enough money to purchase a shop of her own. The family lived in the rooms above, and they named the premises ‘Anning’s Fossil Depot’. Business was soon flourishing, and the local press reported the opening, mentioning that in the middle of the display was a fine ichthyosaur skeleton. Geologists came to buy specimens from her, including collectors like Gideon Mantell, George William Featherstonhaugh (a curious, ancient English surname simply pronounced ‘fanshaw’) who described her as ‘a very clever funny Creature’, and even royalty: King Frederick Augustus II of Saxony visited her shop to buy a fossil ichthyosaur skeleton. In her later years Anning lost most of her personal money through a bad investment – sources are uncertain how this occurred – and William Buckland approached the British Association for the Advancement of Science and the Government to propose that she was given funds to continue her work. Mary Anning was granted a modest civil list pension by the royal household, in recognition of her contributions to the new science of palæontology. It brought her a trifling sum of just £25 each year, equivalent to £1,200 or some $1,600 in 2018. The Civil List Act 1837 stipulated that these pensions should be granted ‘to such persons only as have just claims on the royal beneficence or who by their personal services to the Crown, or by the performance of duties to the public, or by their useful discoveries in science and attainments in literature and the arts, have merited the gracious consideration of their sovereign and the gratitude of their country.’ Artistic civil list pensioners of the early nineteenth century were granted larger sums; the poets Lord Byron and William Wordsworth each received £300.
By the mid-1840s Mary Anning began to acquire a new reputation – her behaviour was changing, and the local people thought she was becoming an alcoholic. They were wrong: she had developed cancer of the breast. To keep the pain under control she drank increasing amounts of laudanum, a