Mary Anning - Princess of Palaeontology - Fossil Finder!

Mary Anning was born in Lyme Regis in 1799, Mary Anning was marked out for an unusual life at the age of 15 months when in 1800 a lightning strike in the village caught four people in the open. Three died but Mary survived.

Mary's father, Richard, was a cabinet maker who supplemented his income by mining the coastal cliff-side fossil beds near Lyme Regis, and selling his finds to tourists. Richard Anning moved to Lyme from Colyton in Devon. He married Mary Moore on 8 August 1793 in Blandford. Returning to Lyme, the couple lived in a house built on the town’s bridge, and attended the local Congregational Church, where their children were baptized. Soon after their marriage a daughter Mary was born. She was followed by a second daughter, Martha, who died almost at once, then by a son Joseph, in 1796. In 1798 a second son, Henry, died in infancy and the eldest child, Mary, was burned to death, either sitting too close to the fire, or falling into it. When another daughter was born the following May, she was given the name of her dead sister, Mary. At least four more children followed: Henry, 1801; Percival, 1803; Elizabeth, 1804; and Richard, 1809. All died within a couple of years of birth, leaving only two surviving children, Joseph and Mary, when their father Richard died in 1810 at age 44. When he died of tuberculosis the Anning family was left without support. Mary and her brother Joseph began collecting fossils full-time in an effort to earn some income.

One of Anning's first discoveries was made shortly after her father's death when she was just twelve. She found the first complete skeleton of an ichthyosaur ever discovered, though ichthyosaur fossil fragments had been found in Wales as early as 1699. Her brother had discovered the skull of what appeared to be a large crocodile a year earlier. The rest of the skeleton was not to be found at first, but Mary located it after a storm scoured away a portion of the cliff containing it. It was an important find, and was soon described in the Transactions of the Royal Society. She went on to find two other distinct species of ichthyosaur.

As her reputation grew, Mary came to the attention of Thomas Birch, a wealthy fossil collector. Disturbed by the poverty of the Anning family, Birch arranged for the sale of his own fossil collection, the proceeds of which (some £400) were given to the Annings. Put on a sure (if somewhat austere) financial footing for the first time in a decade, Mary carried on with her fossil collecting even after her brother gained employment as an upholsterer.

Her next major discovery was a skeleton of a plesiosaur in 1821, the first of its kind to be found. The fossil was subsequently described by William Conybeare as Plesiosaurus dolichodeirus and is the type specimen (holotype) of the species, which itself is the type species of the genus. She found an 'unrivalled specimen' of Dapedium politum, a ray-finned fish, as described in 1828. She discovered an important fossil of a pterosaur, a Pterodactylus macronyx (later renamed by Richard Owen Dimorphodon macronyx), the first found outside Germany and thought to be the first complete skeleton.

Those were the three finds that left her mark in history, but she continued collecting for the remainder of her life, making numerous other contributions to early paleontology. In her late thirties she was granted an annuity by the British Association for the Advancement of Science in return for her efforts. Anning died at the age of 47, of breast cancer. A few months earlier she had been made an honorary member of the Geological Society of London despite being ineligible for regular membership due to the sexist mores of the time.

Her discoveries of dinosaur fossils along the Jurassic Coast were ground-breaking at the time and laid the foundations for much of our knowledge of dinosaurs. She was known as "Princess of palaeontology". Each year the Philpott Museum holds a special Mary Anning weekend of events to commemorate her life.