September 29, 2018 • 20 mins
Today we're revisiting an episodefrom Sarah and Deblina about Mary Anning. She started hunting for fossils in Lyme Regis in the early 1800s. Around 1811, she uncovered the complete skeleton of an ichthyosaurus. She made several significant contributions to paleontology, so why didn't she always get credit for her work?
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Hey everybody, it is Saturday, which means it's time for
a stuff you missed in History class classic. Today, we
are revisiting an episode from in the Sarah and to
Blina era. It is on Mary Anning, who during her
lifetime was nicknamed the Princess of paleontology. So here we go.
Welcome to Stuff you Missed in History Class from how
(00:24):
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm to bling a chalkoate boarding and I'm fair down
and researching. This episode's topic really took me back to
my childhood days digging for artifacts, fossils and the like
(00:44):
in my backyard and small town Alabama. I mean, did
you ever do this, Sarah? Did you look for treasures?
I did? I did, and I don't think I ever
came up with a whole lot more than old clay
plumbing pipe, so I mean, at least that's something. Well,
my friend Katie I actually had a game that we
made up was really a game, but we called it archaeologists,
and we would go to the trails behind my house
(01:07):
and come back with these big clumps of dirt and
then we would sit on my parents deck with my
dad's tools and like chisel at them and pretend like
we were finding things while we sang songs from the
movie Beaches. Yeah, he must have been really did when
Drastic Park came out, I was, I liked I liked
the book. I read the book before it came out,
(01:27):
and I was really excited about that movie. But yeah,
but of course in our little archaeologist game, we never
came up with anything, just piles of dirt, which I'm
sure my parents loved. But the subject of today's podcast,
Mary Anning, also started hunting for fossils in her hometown
in the early eighteen hundreds at a very young age,
but she made out much better than most kids. Anning
(01:49):
not only found many authentic fossils, she found entire skeletons
of prehistoric creatures, and it is often considered a key
player in the development of paleontology as science. All of
this happened even before the term dinosaur even existed. She
didn't even know exactly what she was trying to find
with these what we're certainly more than games. So in fact,
(02:11):
she's been called quote one of the most accomplished fossil
hunters of her time, and some scientists even believe her
work may have contributed to the theories of Charles Darwin himself.
But Mary Anning wasn't fossil hunting for the sake of
science alone, and she wasn't just doing it for childhood
kicks either. Like like us to Blena, We're going to
(02:32):
take a look today at what exactly motivated this prolific
paleontologist and why if she's linked to the likes of
men like Charles Darwin and other prominent scientists, her name
isn't nearly as well known as you might expect it
to be. First, though, we need to give you a
little bit of background on where Mary Annie lived, because
it certainly gave her a distinct advantage as a fossil hunter.
(02:55):
She was born and lived her entire life in a
town called Lime Regis on England Channel coast. In the
late eighteenth century, this became a really fashionable resort area
and has been featured in books including Jane Austen's Persuasion
and John fouls The French Lieutenants Woman. But according to
an article by Michael A. Taylor and U. S. Torrens
in Natural History, way before it became a resort town
(03:19):
two hundred million years ago. In fact, Lime Regis, along
with the rest of southern Britain, was submerged under tropical
sea near the equator, so animals that died in those
waters often ended up embedded and preserved in the mud
of that submerged land. And that's why this region, the
English Channel coast of southern England known as the Jurassic Coast,
(03:41):
has been so abundant in fossils. It just seems to
have an almost never ending supply of them. And Lime
Regius in particular is surrounded by cliffs composed of alternating
bands of limestone and slate which are constantly being eroded
by the elements, and every time they are eroded a
little bit more they reveal all kinds of fossilized treasures.
(04:03):
And according to Encyclopedia Britannica, the cliffs date from the
late Jurassic to Early Jurassic period, so about two million
to one hundred and seventy six million years ago, so
there's plenty of time to have stored up lots of fossils.
So that's just a basic, not to science e snapshot
(04:23):
of the area where Mary Annie was born May one,
and she was one of somewhere around ten kids of
a poor cabinet maker named Richard Anning and his wife
Mary Moore, now the Annie's, which is part of why
we don't exactly know how many kids they had. They
had it pretty rough as far as their kids were concerned.
Only two children and that was Mary and her older
(04:45):
brother Joseph, managed to survive. All the other children were
lost to illness or accident along the way, and there
was even another child called Mary before the Mary we're
focusing on in this episode came around and according to
a two thousand five article in British Heritage are Mary
covered in this podcast had a narrow escape of her
(05:06):
own as a child. When she was only about a
year old, she and her nursemaid got caught out in
a pretty bad thunderstorm, and when the nursemaid took Mary
and sought shelter along with a couple of other people
underneath a big tree, the tree got struck by lightning
and killed all the three adults underneath the tree and
burned Mary pretty badly too. When Mary was found, in fact,
(05:29):
everyone thought that she was dead too, but they managed
to revive her, and according to her family, this event
really changed their child. Somehow she was considered quote dull before,
but after, I mean for a one year old, I'm
not sure, but after this event she became really intelligent
and lively and grew up that way too. So to
(05:52):
her family, it seemed like the lightning had changed the
course of Mary's life, being struck by lightning. And as
we mentioned earlier, around the time that Mary was born,
Limeary just started becoming a hotspot for vacationers and that
created a market for what we're known as local curios
or curiosities. Local townspeople would collect and pedal fossils for cash,
(06:13):
and this included fossil shells which they called lady fingers,
and stones that looked like pieces of backbone, which they
called vertebarries. Um sounds like a new cereal, it does.
Most people involved in these sorts of transactions, of course,
(06:35):
had no idea that the items were fossils. Tourists were
just mainly buying them as souvenirs cho kind of exactly.
And Mary's father, Richard, was one of these amateur fossil collectors,
and he would sell these curiosities to tourists and it
became a major source of income for his entire family,
and Mary of course became pretty interested in these curious too.
(06:57):
She'd go along with her father, sometimes collecting fossiles, collecting
shells along the shores, and even climbing around the cliffs
looking for things. And on these outings, Mary learned how
to feel out her fines and carefully remove items that
were lodged into the cliffs and to bleed. It sounds
like you already know how to do this with your
with your mud fines carefully. I don't know about the
(07:18):
cliffs part of it, though, Sarah, I don't like heights,
would probably just stay on the ground. But I mean,
even then, climbing around cliffs wasn't exactly the safest hobby
you could have after all. And in eighteen ten, Richard
Anne actually had an accident while he was hunting for fossils.
Some sources say that he fell from a cliff, others
say that he was caught in a rock slide, but
either way, he died soon afterward. Mary was of course devastated,
(07:41):
but she kept hunting for fossils like she would have
anyway with her father, perhaps as a way to remember him.
And then one day she sold a fossil this kind
of coiled shell known as a snake stone to a tourist,
and it's sort of lit a fire under her. She
realized that her hobby could be lucrative, you know, she
could help supplement some of that income her family had
(08:02):
lost with the death of her father. They really needed
money now more than ever, so she started to hit
the beach even harder, looking for fossil fines in order
to help support her family. And then in eighteen eleven,
the year after her father's death, her brother Joseph found
this huge skull on the beach and he wasn't sure
what it was exactly. It appeared to be kind of
(08:24):
similar to a crocodile skull, and he showed it to Mary,
who was twelve years old at the time, but according
to that British Heritage article that we mentioned earlier, a
month's slide covered their find before they could really do
anything about it. About a year later, though, Mary rediscovered
fossils in that area and excavated them, and it turned
out to be the entire seventeen foot long skeleton of
(08:47):
an Ichthyosaurus, a prehistoric marine reptile that's kind of similar
in the way it looks to a dolphin. The source
translates to fish lizard. According to Taylor and Torren's article,
this wasn't the first iosurd to be discovered, but it
did become the quote type specimen of the Atheosaurus, the
scientifically described specimen for which the genus was officially named.
(09:09):
And as you can imagine, a fine like that would
command better prices than what you get from your average tourists,
better than shells that like. Mary ended up selling this
to Henry hast Henley, who was the chief property owner
in the area, for twenty three pounds, which was a
huge amount. It's the equivalent of several thousand pounds today,
(09:30):
so for Mary's poor family, this was a huge deal.
It took years of study for scientists to settle on
exactly what Mary's find was, but it caused a lot
of buzz in the scientific community and the religious community
as well, because around this time religion still had a
very big influence on science, and scientists really tried to
(09:51):
fit their findings into the Bible story of creation. So basically,
the belief was that God had created the earth only
about six thousand years prior to this time, and everything
had remained essentially unchanged since Noah and the flood. So
there were all these animals, and they all appeared on
Earth at the same time, and they were all as
(10:12):
they were. And as a result, for some time, people
believed that fossils such as even things like masted on bones,
were the remains of animals that still existed somewhere on
the planet. But of course, as more fossil finds like
Mary's came to life and the fossil Eve's creatures became
more and more exotic, like an Acosaurus, people finally had
(10:34):
to start accepting the possibility that creatures could become extinct.
And this is the part that many believe helped Charles
Darwin make the case for natural selection by introducing the
idea that some species could really disappear forever. Mary, though,
wasn't coming at her work from the position of a
scientist or even what was known as a quote gentleman collector.
(10:55):
Her family largely depended on her finds to live, and
so she continued to hunt for fossils pretty much every
single day, but it was many years before she had
another big find, and in the meantime business was pretty spotty.
Sometimes she wouldn't find much besides souvenir level kind of stuff,
and her family struggled, and at other times she made
sales to private collectors into museums and had a little
(11:17):
bit of money. A lot of her best finds were
in the winter, because that's when the erosion made the
most difference in what she could find. Probably not as
many tourists around too, I bet picking up all the
good stuff. True. In the years before eighteen twenty, though,
things really got so bad for the Innings. At one
point they were apparently selling furniture to pay their rent
that a collector named Thomas Burch, who had purchased things
(11:40):
for Mary, auctioned his collection and donated the proceeds to
the Inning family, and this started a rumor that the
fifty two year old Birch and the twenty one year
old Mary had a sexual relationship. But around things finally
started to turn around for Mary. She found a twenty
foot theosaur and a couple additional smaller ones over the
(12:03):
following year. Then in eight four she made what's considered
her most famous find. Yeah, she discovered the first intact
plesiosaurus skeleton. This animal had never been seen before. It
(12:27):
was also a marine animal, but totally different from an ichthyosaurus.
The plesiosaur had a long neck and a fat body,
and looked more like a lizard than a fish. British
geologist William Buckland described it thus, he said, quote to
the head of the lizard united the teeth of the crocodile,
a neck of enormous length resembling the body of a serpent,
a trunk and tail having the proportions of an ordinary quadruped,
(12:51):
and the ribs of a chameleon, and the paddles of
a whale. So it sounds like quite a creature. And
she sold the skeleton to the Duke of Buckingham for
two owns. And it was really so weird looking that
some people, including the renowned French zoologist George Cuvier, doubted
it was real. Kuvier thought that Mary had faked the
whole thing, but upon further study he realized it was
(13:14):
in fact a real specimen. And after QBA authenticated the
find many people started to take Mary's fossil findings a
little more seriously. You know, this lady actually knew what
was going on, and she did continue to make discoveries too.
In December eighteen twenty eight, she found the fossil of
a flying reptile. It was a raven size skeleton that,
(13:35):
according to some sources, represented the first evidence of a
prehistoric winged creature, even though according to Encyclopedia Britannica, it
was the pterosaur specimen found first outside of Germany, so
the first one found somewhere besides Germany. So Buckland bought
the skeleton from Mary and gave it the name Pterodactylus macronics,
(13:55):
meaning winged fingers, And just a year later, in eighteen
twenty nine, Mary found the skeleton of a fish like
creature called a school lur ja, which many many believed
was an evolutionary intermediary between sharks and rays. So ultimately,
with all these fossils coming up in her hands, Mary
became something of a local celebrity. She was called the
(14:15):
fossil Woman and the Princess of paleontology, a nickname given
to her by a German scientist, and she really put
her hometown on the map too for the scientific community.
People had known that this area was rich in fossils before,
but Mary's discovery started to attract scientists who wanted to
work with her. A really big deal because at the time,
(14:35):
women in science were still pretty rare, so she'd go
on fossil hunting expeditions with famous scientists like Buckland and
paleontologist Richard Owen, who's credited with coining the term dinosauria
in eighteen forty two. So um getting out there with
the major players in the field at the time, and
though Mary lacked any sort of formal scientific training, she
(14:59):
managed to press these rather impressive science guys, not just
because of her knowledge of the local area in which
she was fossil hunting, but she seemed to understand the
anatomy of the creatures that she was excavating, and would
even argue with established researchers on certain points. Non scientists
would often come just to check Mary out, too, because
she was kind of a character. Some described her as
(15:21):
a quote prim pedantic vinegar looking thin female, and others
described her as a quote strong, energetic spinster. Still others
as a quote clever, funny creature. So she herself was
kind of a curiosity for better or worse, it sounds so. Unfortunately, though,
Mary often didn't get credit for these fossil findes, and
(15:41):
this is partly because many scientists didn't give her credit
in books and papers they published on her discoveries, and
then partly because her role in the whole fossil collecting
business was in the trade aspect of it. She wasn't
writing the papers, she wasn't holding them in collections, and
according to Encyclopedia Britannica, it was the collectors who would
(16:01):
donate these specimens to institutions like museums and who would
usually get credited with their discovery. A few scientists did
give her credit in their work, but not as many
as should have, according to that British Heritage article we
mentioned earlier. She knew that too. Apparently a friend once
said quote she says, the world has used her ill.
(16:22):
These men of learning have sucked her brains and made
a great deal by publishing works of which she furnished
the contents, while she derived none of the advantages. She
was even denied admission to the Geological Society of London
despite her accomplishments, because they didn't allow women in the
organization at that time, though they finally made her an
honorary member, not an official member, but an honorary member
(16:44):
in seven. She didn't let any of that resentment stop
her from practicing her trade, though right up until the end.
According to a profile on Mary Anning by Alex k Rich,
she bought a house for herself and her mother and
they ran a store out of it, from which they
sold fossils, and they called the whole thing Fossil Depot,
which is rather charming. Mary died of breast cancer on
(17:07):
March nine, and to commemorate her achievements, the townspeople installed
a stained glass window depicting her image in the town's
church and a plaque too, near the cliffs where she
had first discovered that original I sur. And of course
you can still see her finds around the head of
the first I surs she discovered can be found. I
(17:28):
think I believe it can still be found in the
Natural History Museum in London. And there's another way that
you may have unwittingly remembered her throughout the years of
your life. Mary may have been the inspiration for the
well known tongue twister. She sells sea shells by the seashore.
So if you sort of remember back to the beginning
(17:49):
of the podcast when we're talking about how she used
to try to sell those shells to tourists, those fossil
ize shells. That's where that could have come from. And
it was written by English songwriter Terry Sullivan in nineteen
o eight, and act go something like this. I'm gonna
say it really slow because it is a tongue twister.
After all, she sells sea shells on the sea shore.
(18:09):
The shells she sells are sea shells, I'm sure for
if she sells sea shells on the sea shore, then
I'm sure she sells sea shore shells. Almost I kind
of fell apart there at the end. I was I
was testing this out before we went into recording, and
I was thinking, like, you know, the she sells sea
(18:29):
shells by the sea shore, because you probably have been
practicing that one. I mean, not practicing, like getting ready
for this moment, but you know, you've known it since
you're early fossil hunting, right, you kind of get the
cadence of it. But when you get these other ones
thrown in, it's sort of, oh my god. The shopper
I'm imagining that are our listeners who listen to the
(18:50):
podcast to practice their English are probably wondering what on
earth has happened right now? That's true. I mean, I
don't know how ubiquitous these tongue twisters are, but yeah,
for novice English speakers, maybe the ultimate. Maybe wait, awhile
before you try to tackle this one. It's tough. So anyway,
I thought that would be a fun way to kind
(19:10):
of end off this podcast about Mary anning Um with
this tongue twister that I didn't even realize there was
an inspiration for it. I thought people just kind of
pulled these things out of the air. I know, is
there a Peter Piper to Chuck Chuck, rubber Baby, Buggy Bumper,
I don't know. I mean, I'm gonna have to go
start googling tongue twisters now and find out if they
(19:32):
could be a series stories. Fine, thank you so much
for joining us for this Saturday classic. Since this is
out of the archive, if you heard an email address
or a Facebook U r L or something similar during
the course of the show, that may be obsolete. Now.
(19:52):
So here's our current contact information. We are at History
Podcast at how Stuff Works dot com, and then we're
at Missed in His Street. All over social media that
is our name on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, and Instagram.
Thanks again for listening for more on this and thousands
of other topics. Visit how staff works dot com.
Hey everybody, it is Saturday, which means it's time for
a stuff you missed in History class classic. Today, we
are revisiting an episode from in the Sarah and to
Blina era. It is on Mary Anning, who during her
lifetime was nicknamed the Princess of paleontology. So here we go.
Welcome to Stuff you Missed in History Class from how
(00:24):
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm to bling a chalkoate boarding and I'm fair down
and researching. This episode's topic really took me back to
my childhood days digging for artifacts, fossils and the like
(00:44):
in my backyard and small town Alabama. I mean, did
you ever do this, Sarah? Did you look for treasures?
I did? I did, and I don't think I ever
came up with a whole lot more than old clay
plumbing pipe, so I mean, at least that's something. Well,
my friend Katie I actually had a game that we
made up was really a game, but we called it archaeologists,
and we would go to the trails behind my house
(01:07):
and come back with these big clumps of dirt and
then we would sit on my parents deck with my
dad's tools and like chisel at them and pretend like
we were finding things while we sang songs from the
movie Beaches. Yeah, he must have been really did when
Drastic Park came out, I was, I liked I liked
the book. I read the book before it came out,
(01:27):
and I was really excited about that movie. But yeah,
but of course in our little archaeologist game, we never
came up with anything, just piles of dirt, which I'm
sure my parents loved. But the subject of today's podcast,
Mary Anning, also started hunting for fossils in her hometown
in the early eighteen hundreds at a very young age,
but she made out much better than most kids. Anning
(01:49):
not only found many authentic fossils, she found entire skeletons
of prehistoric creatures, and it is often considered a key
player in the development of paleontology as science. All of
this happened even before the term dinosaur even existed. She
didn't even know exactly what she was trying to find
with these what we're certainly more than games. So in fact,
(02:11):
she's been called quote one of the most accomplished fossil
hunters of her time, and some scientists even believe her
work may have contributed to the theories of Charles Darwin himself.
But Mary Anning wasn't fossil hunting for the sake of
science alone, and she wasn't just doing it for childhood
kicks either. Like like us to Blena, We're going to
(02:32):
take a look today at what exactly motivated this prolific
paleontologist and why if she's linked to the likes of
men like Charles Darwin and other prominent scientists, her name
isn't nearly as well known as you might expect it
to be. First, though, we need to give you a
little bit of background on where Mary Annie lived, because
it certainly gave her a distinct advantage as a fossil hunter.
(02:55):
She was born and lived her entire life in a
town called Lime Regis on England Channel coast. In the
late eighteenth century, this became a really fashionable resort area
and has been featured in books including Jane Austen's Persuasion
and John fouls The French Lieutenants Woman. But according to
an article by Michael A. Taylor and U. S. Torrens
in Natural History, way before it became a resort town
(03:19):
two hundred million years ago. In fact, Lime Regis, along
with the rest of southern Britain, was submerged under tropical
sea near the equator, so animals that died in those
waters often ended up embedded and preserved in the mud
of that submerged land. And that's why this region, the
English Channel coast of southern England known as the Jurassic Coast,
(03:41):
has been so abundant in fossils. It just seems to
have an almost never ending supply of them. And Lime
Regius in particular is surrounded by cliffs composed of alternating
bands of limestone and slate which are constantly being eroded
by the elements, and every time they are eroded a
little bit more they reveal all kinds of fossilized treasures.
(04:03):
And according to Encyclopedia Britannica, the cliffs date from the
late Jurassic to Early Jurassic period, so about two million
to one hundred and seventy six million years ago, so
there's plenty of time to have stored up lots of fossils.
So that's just a basic, not to science e snapshot
(04:23):
of the area where Mary Annie was born May one,
and she was one of somewhere around ten kids of
a poor cabinet maker named Richard Anning and his wife
Mary Moore, now the Annie's, which is part of why
we don't exactly know how many kids they had. They
had it pretty rough as far as their kids were concerned.
Only two children and that was Mary and her older
(04:45):
brother Joseph, managed to survive. All the other children were
lost to illness or accident along the way, and there
was even another child called Mary before the Mary we're
focusing on in this episode came around and according to
a two thousand five article in British Heritage are Mary
covered in this podcast had a narrow escape of her
(05:06):
own as a child. When she was only about a
year old, she and her nursemaid got caught out in
a pretty bad thunderstorm, and when the nursemaid took Mary
and sought shelter along with a couple of other people
underneath a big tree, the tree got struck by lightning
and killed all the three adults underneath the tree and
burned Mary pretty badly too. When Mary was found, in fact,
(05:29):
everyone thought that she was dead too, but they managed
to revive her, and according to her family, this event
really changed their child. Somehow she was considered quote dull before,
but after, I mean for a one year old, I'm
not sure, but after this event she became really intelligent
and lively and grew up that way too. So to
(05:52):
her family, it seemed like the lightning had changed the
course of Mary's life, being struck by lightning. And as
we mentioned earlier, around the time that Mary was born,
Limeary just started becoming a hotspot for vacationers and that
created a market for what we're known as local curios
or curiosities. Local townspeople would collect and pedal fossils for cash,
(06:13):
and this included fossil shells which they called lady fingers,
and stones that looked like pieces of backbone, which they
called vertebarries. Um sounds like a new cereal, it does.
Most people involved in these sorts of transactions, of course,
(06:35):
had no idea that the items were fossils. Tourists were
just mainly buying them as souvenirs cho kind of exactly.
And Mary's father, Richard, was one of these amateur fossil collectors,
and he would sell these curiosities to tourists and it
became a major source of income for his entire family,
and Mary of course became pretty interested in these curious too.
(06:57):
She'd go along with her father, sometimes collecting fossiles, collecting
shells along the shores, and even climbing around the cliffs
looking for things. And on these outings, Mary learned how
to feel out her fines and carefully remove items that
were lodged into the cliffs and to bleed. It sounds
like you already know how to do this with your
with your mud fines carefully. I don't know about the
(07:18):
cliffs part of it, though, Sarah, I don't like heights,
would probably just stay on the ground. But I mean,
even then, climbing around cliffs wasn't exactly the safest hobby
you could have after all. And in eighteen ten, Richard
Anne actually had an accident while he was hunting for fossils.
Some sources say that he fell from a cliff, others
say that he was caught in a rock slide, but
either way, he died soon afterward. Mary was of course devastated,
(07:41):
but she kept hunting for fossils like she would have
anyway with her father, perhaps as a way to remember him.
And then one day she sold a fossil this kind
of coiled shell known as a snake stone to a tourist,
and it's sort of lit a fire under her. She
realized that her hobby could be lucrative, you know, she
could help supplement some of that income her family had
(08:02):
lost with the death of her father. They really needed
money now more than ever, so she started to hit
the beach even harder, looking for fossil fines in order
to help support her family. And then in eighteen eleven,
the year after her father's death, her brother Joseph found
this huge skull on the beach and he wasn't sure
what it was exactly. It appeared to be kind of
(08:24):
similar to a crocodile skull, and he showed it to Mary,
who was twelve years old at the time, but according
to that British Heritage article that we mentioned earlier, a
month's slide covered their find before they could really do
anything about it. About a year later, though, Mary rediscovered
fossils in that area and excavated them, and it turned
out to be the entire seventeen foot long skeleton of
(08:47):
an Ichthyosaurus, a prehistoric marine reptile that's kind of similar
in the way it looks to a dolphin. The source
translates to fish lizard. According to Taylor and Torren's article,
this wasn't the first iosurd to be discovered, but it
did become the quote type specimen of the Atheosaurus, the
scientifically described specimen for which the genus was officially named.
(09:09):
And as you can imagine, a fine like that would
command better prices than what you get from your average tourists,
better than shells that like. Mary ended up selling this
to Henry hast Henley, who was the chief property owner
in the area, for twenty three pounds, which was a
huge amount. It's the equivalent of several thousand pounds today,
(09:30):
so for Mary's poor family, this was a huge deal.
It took years of study for scientists to settle on
exactly what Mary's find was, but it caused a lot
of buzz in the scientific community and the religious community
as well, because around this time religion still had a
very big influence on science, and scientists really tried to
(09:51):
fit their findings into the Bible story of creation. So basically,
the belief was that God had created the earth only
about six thousand years prior to this time, and everything
had remained essentially unchanged since Noah and the flood. So
there were all these animals, and they all appeared on
Earth at the same time, and they were all as
(10:12):
they were. And as a result, for some time, people
believed that fossils such as even things like masted on bones,
were the remains of animals that still existed somewhere on
the planet. But of course, as more fossil finds like
Mary's came to life and the fossil Eve's creatures became
more and more exotic, like an Acosaurus, people finally had
(10:34):
to start accepting the possibility that creatures could become extinct.
And this is the part that many believe helped Charles
Darwin make the case for natural selection by introducing the
idea that some species could really disappear forever. Mary, though,
wasn't coming at her work from the position of a
scientist or even what was known as a quote gentleman collector.
(10:55):
Her family largely depended on her finds to live, and
so she continued to hunt for fossils pretty much every
single day, but it was many years before she had
another big find, and in the meantime business was pretty spotty.
Sometimes she wouldn't find much besides souvenir level kind of stuff,
and her family struggled, and at other times she made
sales to private collectors into museums and had a little
(11:17):
bit of money. A lot of her best finds were
in the winter, because that's when the erosion made the
most difference in what she could find. Probably not as
many tourists around too, I bet picking up all the
good stuff. True. In the years before eighteen twenty, though,
things really got so bad for the Innings. At one
point they were apparently selling furniture to pay their rent
that a collector named Thomas Burch, who had purchased things
(11:40):
for Mary, auctioned his collection and donated the proceeds to
the Inning family, and this started a rumor that the
fifty two year old Birch and the twenty one year
old Mary had a sexual relationship. But around things finally
started to turn around for Mary. She found a twenty
foot theosaur and a couple additional smaller ones over the
(12:03):
following year. Then in eight four she made what's considered
her most famous find. Yeah, she discovered the first intact
plesiosaurus skeleton. This animal had never been seen before. It
(12:27):
was also a marine animal, but totally different from an ichthyosaurus.
The plesiosaur had a long neck and a fat body,
and looked more like a lizard than a fish. British
geologist William Buckland described it thus, he said, quote to
the head of the lizard united the teeth of the crocodile,
a neck of enormous length resembling the body of a serpent,
a trunk and tail having the proportions of an ordinary quadruped,
(12:51):
and the ribs of a chameleon, and the paddles of
a whale. So it sounds like quite a creature. And
she sold the skeleton to the Duke of Buckingham for
two owns. And it was really so weird looking that
some people, including the renowned French zoologist George Cuvier, doubted
it was real. Kuvier thought that Mary had faked the
whole thing, but upon further study he realized it was
(13:14):
in fact a real specimen. And after QBA authenticated the
find many people started to take Mary's fossil findings a
little more seriously. You know, this lady actually knew what
was going on, and she did continue to make discoveries too.
In December eighteen twenty eight, she found the fossil of
a flying reptile. It was a raven size skeleton that,
(13:35):
according to some sources, represented the first evidence of a
prehistoric winged creature, even though according to Encyclopedia Britannica, it
was the pterosaur specimen found first outside of Germany, so
the first one found somewhere besides Germany. So Buckland bought
the skeleton from Mary and gave it the name Pterodactylus macronics,
(13:55):
meaning winged fingers, And just a year later, in eighteen
twenty nine, Mary found the skeleton of a fish like
creature called a school lur ja, which many many believed
was an evolutionary intermediary between sharks and rays. So ultimately,
with all these fossils coming up in her hands, Mary
became something of a local celebrity. She was called the
(14:15):
fossil Woman and the Princess of paleontology, a nickname given
to her by a German scientist, and she really put
her hometown on the map too for the scientific community.
People had known that this area was rich in fossils before,
but Mary's discovery started to attract scientists who wanted to
work with her. A really big deal because at the time,
(14:35):
women in science were still pretty rare, so she'd go
on fossil hunting expeditions with famous scientists like Buckland and
paleontologist Richard Owen, who's credited with coining the term dinosauria
in eighteen forty two. So um getting out there with
the major players in the field at the time, and
though Mary lacked any sort of formal scientific training, she
(14:59):
managed to press these rather impressive science guys, not just
because of her knowledge of the local area in which
she was fossil hunting, but she seemed to understand the
anatomy of the creatures that she was excavating, and would
even argue with established researchers on certain points. Non scientists
would often come just to check Mary out, too, because
she was kind of a character. Some described her as
(15:21):
a quote prim pedantic vinegar looking thin female, and others
described her as a quote strong, energetic spinster. Still others
as a quote clever, funny creature. So she herself was
kind of a curiosity for better or worse, it sounds so. Unfortunately, though,
Mary often didn't get credit for these fossil findes, and
(15:41):
this is partly because many scientists didn't give her credit
in books and papers they published on her discoveries, and
then partly because her role in the whole fossil collecting
business was in the trade aspect of it. She wasn't
writing the papers, she wasn't holding them in collections, and
according to Encyclopedia Britannica, it was the collectors who would
(16:01):
donate these specimens to institutions like museums and who would
usually get credited with their discovery. A few scientists did
give her credit in their work, but not as many
as should have, according to that British Heritage article we
mentioned earlier. She knew that too. Apparently a friend once
said quote she says, the world has used her ill.
(16:22):
These men of learning have sucked her brains and made
a great deal by publishing works of which she furnished
the contents, while she derived none of the advantages. She
was even denied admission to the Geological Society of London
despite her accomplishments, because they didn't allow women in the
organization at that time, though they finally made her an
honorary member, not an official member, but an honorary member
(16:44):
in seven. She didn't let any of that resentment stop
her from practicing her trade, though right up until the end.
According to a profile on Mary Anning by Alex k Rich,
she bought a house for herself and her mother and
they ran a store out of it, from which they
sold fossils, and they called the whole thing Fossil Depot,
which is rather charming. Mary died of breast cancer on
(17:07):
March nine, and to commemorate her achievements, the townspeople installed
a stained glass window depicting her image in the town's
church and a plaque too, near the cliffs where she
had first discovered that original I sur. And of course
you can still see her finds around the head of
the first I surs she discovered can be found. I
(17:28):
think I believe it can still be found in the
Natural History Museum in London. And there's another way that
you may have unwittingly remembered her throughout the years of
your life. Mary may have been the inspiration for the
well known tongue twister. She sells sea shells by the seashore.
So if you sort of remember back to the beginning
(17:49):
of the podcast when we're talking about how she used
to try to sell those shells to tourists, those fossil
ize shells. That's where that could have come from. And
it was written by English songwriter Terry Sullivan in nineteen
o eight, and act go something like this. I'm gonna
say it really slow because it is a tongue twister.
After all, she sells sea shells on the sea shore.
(18:09):
The shells she sells are sea shells, I'm sure for
if she sells sea shells on the sea shore, then
I'm sure she sells sea shore shells. Almost I kind
of fell apart there at the end. I was I
was testing this out before we went into recording, and
I was thinking, like, you know, the she sells sea
(18:29):
shells by the sea shore, because you probably have been
practicing that one. I mean, not practicing, like getting ready
for this moment, but you know, you've known it since
you're early fossil hunting, right, you kind of get the
cadence of it. But when you get these other ones
thrown in, it's sort of, oh my god. The shopper
I'm imagining that are our listeners who listen to the
(18:50):
podcast to practice their English are probably wondering what on
earth has happened right now? That's true. I mean, I
don't know how ubiquitous these tongue twisters are, but yeah,
for novice English speakers, maybe the ultimate. Maybe wait, awhile
before you try to tackle this one. It's tough. So anyway,
I thought that would be a fun way to kind
(19:10):
of end off this podcast about Mary anning Um with
this tongue twister that I didn't even realize there was
an inspiration for it. I thought people just kind of
pulled these things out of the air. I know, is
there a Peter Piper to Chuck Chuck, rubber Baby, Buggy Bumper,
I don't know. I mean, I'm gonna have to go
start googling tongue twisters now and find out if they
(19:32):
could be a series stories. Fine, thank you so much
for joining us for this Saturday classic. Since this is
out of the archive, if you heard an email address
or a Facebook U r L or something similar during
the course of the show, that may be obsolete. Now.
(19:52):
So here's our current contact information. We are at History
Podcast at how Stuff Works dot com, and then we're
at Missed in His Street. All over social media that
is our name on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, and Instagram.
Thanks again for listening for more on this and thousands
of other topics. Visit how staff works dot com.
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