This Side of the Pond

Hollywood comes to Dorset about as often as it does the Devils Tower; in other words, not much at all. That’s one reason I’m interested to see a film set to be screened at the Cannes Movie Festival this month; the other is that Ammonite is about one of the more famous scientific names associated with my home county.

You’ve probably heard of her, though you may not know you have. Mary Anning is said to be the “she” in the old tongue twister, “She sells sea shells on the sea shore”.

Mary Anning would have done well in Wyoming, I think, and not just because we’re the equality state. She’d have found plenty to keep her occupied because those weren’t really shells she was selling, but fossils gathered from the Jurassic Coast, and also because Anning is known as the unsung hero of fossil discovery.

Her stomping ground, ironically, was the same stretch of coast on which a group of idiots decided to jump from a 200-foot cliff a couple of weeks ago, which I discussed in some detail in my last column. Anning was doing something much more useful on those beaches, way back in the early 1800s.

Her father was an amateur fossil collector and, by the age of six, Anning was already his sidekick. This, of course, was a time when girls weren’t supposed to be engaging in scientific activities.

It’s oft lamented these days that we hear an awful lot about the contribution of men to science, but very little of those ladies who labored over Bunsen burners. There’s a simple reason for this: until relatively recently, women weren’t supposed to be doing much of anything.

Anning lived at a time when the scientific community was made up of men who belonged to the Church of England. She was not a man, and her family were religious dissenters who followed their own version of the Protestant faith.

Neither of these things made her popular, but it was her gender in particular that excluded her from the Geological Society of London. Nor did she get credit for many of her contributions – the only writing of Anning’s ever published during her lifetime was a letter to the editor of a magazine.

This didn’t stop her from pursuing her passion, and it didn’t stop others from seeking out her expertise. Anning’s father taught her how to find fossils and clean them, and they were then put for sale in his shop.

She taught herself geology and anatomy, which is an impressive feat when she had little formal education to speak of. Unfortunately, while she was still young, her father died suddenly from tuberculosis. Anning’s mother encouraged her to help the family by continuing to sell fossils she found.

Fossils were becoming fashionable at that time and there were plenty of posh people willing to look cultured and intelligent by placing fossils in their curiosity cabinets. This meant she could carry on with her foraging, which was good for all of us, because it wasn’t long before she made her first big find.

When she was just 12 years old – a time when most of us girls are pondering the idea of packing down our dolls and developing an interest in makeup – she dug up a skeleton almost six feet long. Everyone thought it was a crocodile, or a monster, or something from those funny places across the ocean nobody had visited yet, but it was actually an Ichthyosaurus – a marine reptile that lived 200 million years ago.

In her early twenties, she found the first Plesiosaurus. It was a strange and unsettling ex-creature, so obviously everyone said it must be fake.

One of those naysayers was Georges Cuvier, known today as the founding father of paleontology, who spirited the skeleton off to London for a special meeting of the Geological Society. To the surprise of nobody, Anning was not invited.

Cuvier was forced to admit his mistake, but the scientific community still wouldn’t recognize her work. The scientists who bought her fossils would write scientific papers about them and leave out her name.

She then discovered a dimorphodon, the first pterosaur found outside Germany. She continued to sell fossils, sparking an ever-increasing interest from the public. Bear in mind that Charles Darwin hadn’t visited the Galapagos Islands yet, so nobody had a clue what these dinosaurs actually were – I often wonder what it must have been like to live in an age where monsters really seemed to exist.

Anning’s legacy extended to her childhood friend, Henry De la Beche, who was inspired by her work to create the very first piece of art that represented prehistoric life based on fossil evidence, now known as palaeoart. It was called “Duria Antiquior – A More Ancient Dorset” and, heartwarmingly, he sold prints specifically to raise money for Anning, who never did have two coins to rub together.

When she died, aged 47, she was still struggling to earn a living despite a life spent making the kind of discoveries most of us will only ever dream of. Even today, you can see her three biggest finds at the Natural History Museum in London.

It’s thanks to this unusual woman, who ignored the constraints of society and kept on selling those seashells on her sea shore from one end of her life to the other, that the Jurassic Coast is a World Heritage Site and still one of the most popular fossil hunting sites in the world.

“Ammonite” takes some liberties with Anning’s story, particularly when it comes to her love life, but I still think she’d be pleased. The world failed to recognize her while she was alive for who she was and what she contributed to the sum of human understanding. We might still not quite understand her, but at least we’re edging closer in this new era of women in science.