Dan Snow's History Hit - Mary Anning: Palaeontology's Forgotten Pioneer

Episode Date: May 26, 2021

Born in Lyme Regis in 1799, Mary Anning was a pioneering palaeontologist and fossil collector whose story continues to inspire so many scientists to this day. The Jurassic Coast on the south coast of England is one of the richest locations for fossil hunting in the UK, if not in the world. During the early 19th century Mary Anning, and her brother Joseph, made a living discovering and selling fossils to tourists and scientists alike. Although uneducated and poor Mary's knowledge and skills became much sought after by palaeontologists of the period and she made some remarkable discoveries particularly around fossilised dinosaur poo! Despite her contribution to science Mary, as a woman and Dissenter, was often not given the credit she deserved in her lifetime. In this episode, Emma Bernard Curator of Palaeobiology, Natural History Museum, joins Dan to celebrate the life and achievements of this pioneering fossil hunter.You can also watch History Hit's new film Mary Anning: The Forgotten Fossil Hunter

Hello everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. I may have mentioned before that I live on the coast, and I love maritime history. I may have mentioned that in passing. Just a few miles west of my house is the so-called Jurassic Coast. It's a piece of the south coast of England, along the English Channel, where there are Jurassic marine fossil beds that have been exposed by time, tide, seismic shift. I don't know why, actually. Anyway, they're there. And to this day, thousands of people flock there, particularly after big storms and lots of erosion, and go and find bits of ichthyosaur, pterosaur, plaiosaurs, and of course,

the holy grail, fossilised poo. As we do that, we are in the footsteps of the pioneer fossil collector, the OG fossil collector, Mary Anning. She lived at the beginning of the 19th century. Mary Anning was a local woman with no money or education, but who went on to transform our understanding of our geological past, and is one of the great pioneers of paleontology. On this podcast I talk all about Mary Anning to Emma Bernard. She's the curator of fossil fish at the Natural History Museum in London. Exactly the right person to talk to you about Mary Anning and she gives me a brilliant summary of her career and why it matters. If you want to go and watch 19th century history as well as listen to it you can do so at historyhit.tv. It's our new history channel. It was founded about

three years ago and already we're lucky enough to have tens of thousands of subscribers and we're making better and better programs all the time. So please head over to historyhit.tv, subscribe, check it out and we'll do our best to hit new heights. In the meantime though, please enjoy this conversation with the brilliant Emma Bernard about Mary Anning. Emma, great to have you on the podcast. Thanks for coming on. Tell me about this young woman, Mary Anning. Tell me about her background first of all where she's from. Yes so Mary Anning is actually a very inspirational woman. She was actually born in 1799 in Lyme Regis in Dorset to a very poor working class family. She is thought to have had either nine

or ten siblings and it was actually only herself and her brother Joseph that survived into adulthood. and it was actually only herself and her brother Joseph that survived into adulthood. So Mary was born at a time when there was very little opportunities for people such as herself so she had no opportunities to go to school and actually her only education was a Sunday school education as she got a little bit older. When Mary Annan was only 15 months old she had quite a dramatic start to life. She was actually out for the day with some family friends and they were struck by lightning. And that lightning strike actually killed the people that she was with. Fortunately, Mary was able to be revived.

So as I mentioned, Mary Anning was born into quite a poor family and their father was a carpenter. That's how he was able to support his family. But unfortunately, that didn't quite make enough money to help support the family. So he was able to go down to the beach in Lyme Regis, which we now know is very famous for all these fantastic fossils. And he would carefully extract some of these fossils and sell them often to local tourists as they came passing through Lyme Regis. And we think that Mary and her brother Joseph would go down to the beach with their father in search of some of these fossils. Unfortunately, Mary's father died when

she was only 10 years old, leaving their family in a significant amount of debt. So alongside having to rely on parish relief to help put food on their table and pay their rent, the family were basically forced to continue to sell fossils to local tourists passing through Lyme Regis. However, it was not long after their father's death that Mary's brother Joseph found this fantastic skull of something really strange and very unusual. They weren't 100% sure what it was at the time. They thought it might be some form of crocodile. So it was a long snout with big sharp pointy teeth. So Mary Anning went back down the following year and she found the back of the skull and some of the neck vertebrae of this creature which would eventually

become known as an ichthyosaur or fish lizard. What did the tourists think they were buying when they were buying these curios? What did everyone think they were? Yeah so people didn't really know exactly what these fossils were as you said they called them curios or curiosities so some of them were referred to as women's fingers so these were bellum knights So these are long, straight fossils that are related to squid and octopus. So they were very strange and people were just trying to make sense of exactly what these fossils were, these curiosities. The word fossil hadn't actually been invented at this time. So they were more just sort of tourist things that you'd pick up

on your holiday and maybe put on your mantelpiece. So some of these larger vertebrate fossils went on to become some of the very first marine reptiles that were described in scientific literature. So these finds that Mary Anning was coming across and bringing to the educated learner men from London were very, very significant at the time. So you say marine animals, and I know we're not allowed to say dinosaurs, but they are from that period, aren't they? Yes, so the rocks in Lyme Regis are about 200 million years old, and this is more or less smack bang in the Jurassic period,

or often referred to as the time of the dinosaurs. So Lyme Regis and Dorset at the time were actually underwater, so it was sort of very warm tropical seas so we'd have these large marine reptiles fish and sharks and other animals like ammonites that are related to modern day squid and octopus that would be swimming around in the seas. So as these animals died they would fall down to the bottom of the sea and if they weren't predated by other animals they would often get buried by sediment coming off the land and over a period of thousands and millions of years they would slowly become fossils and then as the earth moved again over this long period of about 200

million years they eventually formed the cliffs that we now know of Lyme Regis and Dorset and that is where Mary, along with others, would go scouring these cliffs to try and find these magnificent fossils. And before Mary and others, were there other places in the world that were producing so-called dinosaur bones? Or was Mary bringing these

into the scientific realm for the first time? So a lot of the specimens that Mary Anning was finding, you could sometimes find in other parts of the specimens that Mary Anning was finding, you could sometimes find in other parts of the world. So for example, in Germany, there was these pterosaurs that were being found. So these were large flying reptiles that would swoop over the Jurassic seas and the Jurassic landscape. Now Mary actually found one of the first pterosaur specimens outside of Germany. So pterosaurs were already known to science. However, she was the first person to find them within the United Kingdom. And that's alongside the other marine reptiles that she was finding. So the ichthyosaur specimen that she was

very famous for finding alongside her brother. This was actually one of the first described in the scientific literature. So although other ichthyosaur specimens had been found from the UK and other parts of Europe, this was the first specimen to be described in the scientific literature as being an ichthyosaur specimen. So we refer to that as a holotype. Scientists today still refer back to that initial specimen that Mary and her brother Joseph found to describe new fossils. And how was her description? Was she taken seriously? So when she first started out, and especially as a teenager in her early 20s, she wasn't really

taken very seriously. People would go there, they would buy fossils from her, but she started to become friends with some of the scientists at the time, such as people like William Buckland. And they would go there and purchase fossils from Mary and then they would look at them, describe them in the scientific publications. However, although she didn't have a formal education, she did a lot to educate herself. she did a lot to educate herself so Mary would actually try to get her hands on lots of different scientific literature to painstakingly copy out word from word and also draw the sketches, the figures from these papers to try and educate herself better of the finds that she was actually finding from the beach and because she was out there pretty much day in, day out, she was painstakingly getting rid of all the rock surrounding these fossils. She became very, very skilled at doing that.

And she would actually teach other people how to properly extract these fossils from the rock without damaging them. She also spent a lot of time dissecting modern day animals. So things like fish, obviously it's a seaside town, so she had quite good access to things like fish obviously it's a seaside town so she had quite good access to things like squid and fish and she realised some of the features of these modern animals she was also finding in the fossils so she became very clever at piecing the missing pieces of the puzzle back together again and there was one find that she came across

it's called a chimaeroid so it's relative to modern day sharks and rays. And she found this fossil and she was very puzzled by it. And there's actually letters recorded where she was sending them to what is now Bristol Museum City in Art Gallery, offering them the specimen. specimen and she said in it that she had dissected a ray, a modern day ray, and the vertebrae from that modern day ray didn't look anything like the fossil one that she came across. So therefore she knew that this was something new and something different and therefore they should take more interest within that. In this thing to Dan Snow's history history we're talking about mary anning i've got emma bernard here more after this okay tristan you've got 50 seconds go right so dan's

given me a few seconds to sell the ancients podcast what is the ancients i hear you say well it's like dan's show except ancient history. We've got the groundbreaking new archaeological discoveries. This seems to be the oldest known dated depiction of the animal world, as far as we can tell, anywhere in the world. We've got the big names. It's one of those great things, Pompeii. It's kind of forever rising from the dead and from destruction. We've got the big topics.

The man destroys seven legions in a day. No one in history has done that. Subscribe to The Ancients from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts from. Oh, and Russell Crowe, if you're listening, we would love to have you on The Ancients. Spread the word, people. Spread the word.

What was changing in the world how was mary able to kind of access scientific circles was there more corresponding or did she just get ignored as a low-born hobbyist on a far-flung beach in the south of england yeah i think mary at that time was sort of three things that you just didn't want to be she was female she was from a poor working class background and she didn't have access to a lot of the scholars of the day. So she was typically ignored however there were certain people like William Buckland, Louis Agassiz at the time and George Cuvier, so some of the world's leading scientists that would go to visit Mary Anning to see what she had found and also discuss what she was finding. So an example of this is Mary would find strange rocks on the beach and within these little rocks

or pebbles she would sometimes find small scales of fish. Now she realised that this was actually fossilised faeces, fossilised poo, and she would find them in the same layers of rock as she was finding these marine reptiles. So she discussed this with her friend William Buckland and William Buckland actually described that in a scientific publication that these were coprolites. In the publication he refers to Mary Anning being the finder, however he doesn't quite give her the credit for coming up with this theory that these were actually fossilised faeces. Was she ever taken seriously in her own right or did she, until the day she died, face a struggle to be heard? So to be honest it was a bit of a mixed bag whether she was taken seriously or not

at the time. So some scientists did hold her in quite high regard. So people like Louis Sagasi, who was a famous fossil fish worker at the time actually named two fossil fish specimens after Mary Anning in her honour because of the specimens that she was finding and at that time and as it is today it's still quite an honour to have a new species named after you. However there was a lot of specimens that Mary sold off to lots of different people that eventually ended up in museums several years down the line. However, the Mary Anning name was lost. So Mary was actually quoted by one of her friends, a person called Anna Marie Pinney. She actually wrote referring to Mary Anning. She says that

the world has used her ill and these men of learning have sucked her brains and made a great deal of publishing works of which she has furnished the contents while she has derived none of the advantages. So I think that's quite striking. So Mary there is expressing her annoyance quite rightly that she was meeting with lots of different people, taking them down onto the beach, showing them how to excavate these fossils, discussing some of her observations during part of the extraction, explaining to these gentlemen what she thought that she had found. They would then take these ideas, take these specimens and publish on them in the scientific literature. And more often than not, they never gave credit

to Mary Anning, either as being the finder of that original fossil or they would take the credit for her ideas. Yes, that's fascinating. If there was a museum of Mary Anning's collection, like there is of the Soane Museum, it would be an absolute treasure trove of many of these objects that we recognise from other museums. Yeah, I mean, she must have found probably thousands of specimens over the years. Yeah, I mean, she must have found probably thousands of specimens over the years. Not everyone would have been a showstopper, one of these large marine reptiles that we often have on display in museums. As I said, she would have sold lots of things like ammonites, belemnites, small shells to sort of pass on tourists.

We have collections in the Natural History Museum in London, which came from larger collections of people that dealt with Mary Anning. And we know that these gentlemen would go to Lyme and we'd just purchase fossils from her. They would then get muddled up in their own collection. And then once they died, they ended up in different museums across the world. We know certainly where we directly purchase specimens from Mary Anning, or it's been kept alongside the specimen that is a definite Mary Anning specimen. However, there's a lot of other ones that we just can never be 100% sure whether they definitely came from Mary Anning. I guess we don't know the answer to this, as you just said,

but was she wondering what these species might be? Did she think about science and evolution, perhaps, the changes this planet has seen in its very biggest sense? So this was before Charles Darwin's Origins of Species had actually been published. So it was a very different time back then. People were just starting to think that actually the world might be older than 6,000 years, as was stated in the Bible. There was people like Hutton trying to describe deep time and actually

what deep time meant. Obviously, she didn't come up with evolution, but was she thinking in a really big way about this or focusing on individual finds and animals? Yes, so some of the finds that she came across, she could compare almost exactly to modern day counterparts. However, some of these fossils she came across, like the marine reptiles and some of the fish, there was no modern day counterparts. However, some of these fossils she came across like the marine reptiles and some of the fish, there was no modern day counterpart. So it was like, well, what is this? What could it possibly be? And this was at a time when people were starting to sort of work out that the earth was older than 6,000 years. And that actually there was a whole raft of different animals that lived a long time ago and that were not around today.

So therefore, what were they? What could they have been? And she was almost at the forefront of finding these specimens and trying to work out what they were. And realising that some of these animals were now extinct, no longer with us. She didn't make whole bones, unfortunately, did she? She died, well, I would say, because she's kind of my age, so I'd say she died very young. Yeah, unfortunately, she died when she was only 47 years old, and that was because she was suffering from breast cancer. So there's still a lot of ties to today, as there's a lot of people suffering still from that disease. Her legacy is enormous. What do you think are the important points about her legacy?

from that disease. Her legacy is enormous. What do you think are the important points about her legacy? I think the important points about her legacy is the fact that people are still talking about her today. She's starting to get much more recognition today and there's been a great momentum about trying to get who Mary was, not just the fossils that she found but who she was as a person and I think she was actually very inspirational. certainly for me she was a female from poor working class background but yet she was going out there she was making a living for herself she was finding these fantastic fossils and very much an inspiration. Everywhere I look at the moment we've got Mary Anning stuff going on we've got statues and coins tell us what plans have you got at the museum to celebrate, commemorate Mary Anning?

So at the Natural History Museum in London, just a few years ago, we actually opened up some new membership rooms for some of our members that come into the museum. And these are named after Mary Anning. We have several of her specimens on display, where you can come and see them. And also recently, we've just released, in connection with the Royal Mint, a series of three coins in order to honour Mary Anning. And these feature three different finds that she found. So one of which is the ichthyosaur specimen. The other one is a plesiosaur. So this is a large, long neck reptile with a barrelled body. And the third coin is a pterosaur so this has ended up being called dimorphodon. So I've got my hands on a couple of these coins and they're really great and each one comes with a little story about how she found the fossil and what that fossil actually represents today.

Amazing well good luck with everything that you are doing, good luck reopening the museum and thank you very much for coming on the podcast thank you very much hope you enjoyed the podcast just before you go bit of a favor to ask i totally understand if you don't want to become a subscriber or pay me any cash money, makes sense. But if you could just do me a favour, it's for free. Go to iTunes or wherever you get your podcast.

If you give it a five-star rating and give it an absolutely glowing review, purge yourself, give it a glowing review, I'd really appreciate that. It's tough weather, the law of the jungle out there and I need all the fire support I can get.

So that will boost it up the charts. It's so tiresome, but if you could do it, I'd be very, very grateful. Thank you.