You're Dead to Me - Mary Anning

Episode Date: July 12, 2024

In this episode, Greg Jenner is joined in nineteenth-century England by Dr Michael Taylor and comedian Sara Pascoe to learn all about pioneering palaeontologist Mary Anning. Born to a cabinet-maker father who collected and sold fossils to make extra money, Anning went fossil hunting from a young age. Over the course of her life, she discovered complete ichthyosaur, plesiosaur and pterosaur skeletons, and made great contributions to the emerging discipline of palaeontology. But she was also shut out by the largely male scientific establishment. This episode charts her extraordinary life story, exploring the significance of her discoveries against the background of nineteenth-century debates about religion and science and controversies around the age of the earth. Hosted by: Greg Jenner Research by: Annabel Storr Written by: Emmie Rose Price-Goodfellow, Emma Nagouse, and Greg Jenner Produced by: Emmie Rose Price-Goodfellow and Greg Jenner Audio Producer: Steve Hankey Production Coordinator: Ben Hollands Senior Producer: Emma Nagouse Executive Editor: James Cook

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Listen wherever you get your podcasts. BBC Sounds music radio podcasts. Hello and welcome to You're Dead to Me, the Radio 4 comedy podcast that takes history seriously. My name is Greg Jenner. I'm a public historian, author and broadcaster. And today we are chiselling our way back to 19th century Dorset to learn all about pioneering paleontologist Mary Anning and to help us dig up this story we have two very special guests. In History Corner he's a historian of the 19th century who has held positions at Balliol College Oxford and the

British Library's Eccles Centre for American Studies. You might have read his Orwell Prize nominated book The Interest, How the British Establishment Resisted the Abolition of Slavery or his brilliant new book Impossible Monsters all about the religious backlash, the discovery of dinosaurs. It's my fave book of 2024, You heard it here first. It's Dr Michael Taylor. Welcome Michael. I'm delighted to be here and thank you for inviting me. In Comedy Corner. She's a comedian, actor, author, podcaster, screenwriter. She does it all. You'll know her from all the TV, the panel shows, Live at the Apollo, comedians giving lectures, The Great British Sewing Bee, Last Woman on Earth, Taskmaster, her

sitcom, Out of Her Mind. Maybe you've read her novel Weirdo, but you'll definitely remember her from our first ever episode of You're Dead to Me about Queen Boudica, the iconic queen, and it's the equally iconic queen of comedy herself, Sarah Pascoe. Welcome back, Sarah. Thank you so much for having me. I've been at home waiting as you've had other people be repeat guests thinking, when will my time in the Sun come again? We wanted you back many years I think you've been quite busy with everything. No. You've been traveling the world, you're having family, you've been very... I would have dropped it all for some more history lessons.

We're delighted to have you back. We knew from five years ago that you were a big history fan, you'd been a tour guide. Yes the only little bits of history I know are from the tours they didn't even do history GCSE actually, which is why I want to learn more as an adult. So what do you know about 19th century scientific history? Because you're quite sciencey. 19th century science, where were they up to? I think they had a microscope by now. We knew that the earth went round the sun. We knew about germs, that you should boil water perhaps. That was coming in this 1860s, isn't it?

It's a bit later than what we're about today. Why is it? Okay, so we're really germy still. We're still quite germy. And what do you know about Mary Anning? Well, when I got the email inviting me on the show, it said, you don't need to know anything. And I thought, I can either lie, as in do research, revision, and then pretend I just knew it. And I've not done that.

I've been honest, which means I know nothing. Apart from you just said she's a paleontologist. Yes I did, yeah, okay. So you're really coming in blank on this one. Yeah. So what do you know? So what do you know? So what do you know?

So what do you know? So what do you know? So what do you know? So what do you know? So what do you know? That brings us to the first segment of the podcast. It's called The So What Do You Know? This is where I have a go at guessing what you, our lovely listener, might know about today's subject.

Paleontology is the study of dinosaurs. We've all seen one of the 37 Jurassic Park movies, or we know Ross from Friends. And the name Mary Anning might be familiar to, maybe not to Sarah, but to some of you at home. The Royal Society named her one of the most influential women in British science history. Plus the Mary Anning Rocks campaign fundraised a lovely statue of her in her hometown of Lyme Regis. She's even appeared on a Royal Mail stamp. You may have seen the Kate Winslet and Sir Sheronan movie, Ammonite, which is very loosely

based on her life. But who was this fearless fossil finder? What was it like being a 19th century woman in STEM? And is the Earth a Libra or a Scorpio? Let's find out. Right, Dr Michael, when and where was Mary born? Okay, so Mary's born at the turn of the 18th century, May 1799 in Lyme Regis, which, if you know, it's a beautiful seaside town in Dorset in southwest England. I can say that it's beautiful because I was there at the weekend doing my research for the show. So Mary is born to her mother,

also called Mary, and Richard, her father, who's a big bearded brawny man who's come to Lime Regis from the nearby town of Colleton. And she is one of 10 children. In fact, she's not even the only Mary because she had an elder sister, also called Mary, who very sadly died in a tragic accident whenever her dress caught fire from wood shavings in her father's workshop. Indeed, of the 10 children, possibly because we didn't know enough about germs, it's only Mary and her brother Joseph who survive into adulthood. So that's why we were doubling names up. We won't know them in a couple of years. We had a Mary and it was fine, let's have another Mary.

Yeah, I liked Mary, I miss Mary. We'll call her Mary too. I mean it's ordinary for the 18th century, 19th century, it happens but it's tragic. So a tragically ordinary start to her life, born in 1799, but there was one very extraordinary event in Mary's young life. Can you guess what happened to her at a horse show when she was just 14 months old as a baby? We once went to a petting zoo. My sister turned around to have a photograph taken and she was eating some crisps and the goat behind her

started eating her ponytail. And because it was the 80s, we just thought it was hysterically funny. My sister now is still quite traumatised because when something horrible happens to you like that you want, I guess you want your mom or your sisters to be like, oh, should we get that goat off her rather than like taking more photos? So I'm going to guess it's something like that, like a horse sort of came and gave her a sniff, took some interest in her perhaps.

So it's a horse show. She's 14 months old. She's sort of toddling around, but she'd be quite scared maybe of a big horse coming to say hello. Very sensible answer. It's not what happened Michael is it? No she was struck by lightning. So there was much excitement in Lime Regis. The previous day there had been a prodigious display of vaulting as one historian records and the next day all the townsfolk of Limerie just had piled into the same field again to watch this performance by a travelling troop

of horsemen. But it was the late summer and a storm was rolling in off the English Channel and it thundered and lightning and it was as never before it was again recorded and people began to run away. So some people ran away completely, some people began to hide under coyotesheds and other people, including Mary's nurse, stood under the trees. Oh. Was she in a sort of metal pram or something? Thankfully not that bad. Holding a coat hanger? Why did it hit her? Wearing chainmail, yeah. I wonder though, because people often talk about fossils being the proof that the biblical

version of God created the earth is proof that it probably wasn't that. And God's like, she's going to discover fossils. I'm going to strike her down. Yeah, so the nurse was killed, right? It's tragic. So the nurse dies. Mary is thought to have died at the same time. She's rushed back into the town and has eventually revived after being dunked in a warm bath. And apparently beforehand she had been rather a dull child, I'm not necessarily sure how they measured this, but afterwards the local legend grew that Mary became a bright and intelligent young woman. Wow. So she was probably knocked unconscious more likely would we think, and then revived by the water. Pops in a bath, yeah. I mean

Sarah what superpower would you want or would you be willing to risk getting struck by lightning for? Oh 100% getting it on first try on a were-door My line of work you always sort of with new people and every time you're just do the were-door first time You'd be standing out in a field in a lightning storm. Yeah, you don't want to really you don't want to superpower that people are gonna Go, oh that's Sarah. She flies She's really weird. Okay, so Mary, struck by lightning, she later went on in adulthood to survive a hurricane, a near drowning and a transport accident where she was nearly run down and killed.

So pretty hardcore lady. Michael, perilous weather aside, what was young Mary's childhood like? Is she educated? Is she well off? So beside the forces of nature, Lyme Regis is a pretty dangerous place growing up. It could literally have become a battlefront, because this is the place on the south coast where the Earl of Monmouth landed his rebellious troops. It's where William of Orange decides to land his Dutch troops during the Glorious Revolution. And Lime Regis is closer to the

French naval base at Sherbrooke than it is to London. Napoleon! And this is the high point of the French Revolutionary Wars. Besides that, it's a pretty economically precarious place to live. Lots of people are really struggling to put enough bread on the table, money is scarce everywhere, and Mary's father, Richard, is a cabinetmaker. Now sometimes, depending on what clientele comes along, you can have enough money to pay for your rent, to pay for your food. But lots of times it's a real struggle, even for a family where sadly there's only now two children rather than ten. Mary's father Richard is a dissenting Protestant, which is again

another disadvantage growing up in a place where Anglicanism is the established religion. Mary attends a congregation on Sunday school, so she begins to learn a little bit how to read and write, and that very little learning will go a long way in her later life. Growing up and surviving to adulthood in Lyme Regis and being healthy and being sure of your future, it's a very uncertain thing. Steele I know only from researching Jane Austin, that the expectations for her life would have been a lot about who she was going to marry. And if you come from a family where your parents don't have a lot of money, that's a very difficult prospect.

Yeah, there's not much security there. And the home was flooded, wasn't it, in her childhood? So, you know, on the beach, I guess. It was. And if you go to Lime Ridge, there are all of these houses right down beside the shore. And so whenever these great tides come in during storms you can just see how the water would flood all of the ground floors of the houses and nobody's going to have insurance. And during the great storm of 1824, you know, they see all of the coal that they've stocked up over the summer just disappear. And there's a note in Mary's diary just saying, well, this is going to be a cold winter. And so they'd have been dependent on charity. This is before we had a social state, so the church would have had to help them in situations like that. Oftentimes, but the residents of Lyon Regions did have another way,

finding fossils and selling them to tourists. This is a little bit like crafting on Etsy, perhaps. There are many reasons why people are coming from London and from other places to Lion Regis. One is that there's a real fashion for using salt water as a cure for everything. So polite ladies will come down and in their elaborate bathing gear will walk out into the water and paddle. And Jane Austen does, doesn't she? Yeah, she does. And Jane Austen is one of the visitors to Lion Regis and she in fact goes to Richard Anning as a

cabinet maker to request that he fix a box but apparently he charged far too much and she took her business elsewhere. Oh no! You never really hear that about Austin but she was a real haggler. How much? Yeah. Okay so so Fossiling, how are you making money off this? All around Lime Regis the cliffs up, and whenever those storms roll in, they break up the cliff faces

and the rocks fall down onto the beach. And hidden within those rocks are often fossils. Some are enormous and elaborate, and we'll go on to discuss some of them. Some are just shells. But even those little shells, like ammonites and bellamites, could be sold not only as curiose in themselves,

but they can be hawked as cures for impotence or blindness. Again, this is not a medically developed society, so people were willing to take a punt on these kinds of things. So this is the way that Richard kept his family in bread whenever his cabinet making business was going badly. But it wasn't really enough. So in 1810, whenever he's walking along one of the cliffs, he might have been in his cups, we don't necessarily know, but he was doing it at night and he fell down the cliff face. He almost broke his back and it weakened him enough that he would eventually die of consumption, which was endemic at the time. I actually can't believe this poor family and how much they went through. Yeah, it's brutal isn't it? Consumption, I suppose, we'd call tuberculosis now.

And Joseph is about to come of age where he can go and take an apprenticeship and something, and he decides to go into upholstery. But he leaves debts, Richard, of about £120, and that might not sound an awful lot now, but you can multiply that by about £100. If you're left without an income and you've got £12,000 of debts, what are you going to do? Mary's solution to all of this is to keep hunting for fossils because she knows that if she finds fossils that are beautiful enough and interesting enough, she can still sell them to the wealthy tourists who come down the line. Before we get to her famous discoveries, let's briefly leave her precariously balanced on

a cliff in Dorset and talk about the world that she's born into in terms of intellectual culture and what people believe at the time. Britain and Ireland in the early 1800s, it's a very religious society. So is it awkward when fossils are coming out of the ground that are perhaps looking very old and might be challenging the timeline of, you know, Adam and Eve? How old did they think they were at the time? Ah, well that's the question, right, Michael? So first, it's important to state you're right. It is a very religious society. It might be tempting to think that the Enlightenment has come and gone. The Enlightenment

in England had been relatively conservative. Moreover, remember, who are England fighting at the time? Who are the British fighting at the time? They're fighting the French, who are secular, who are democratic, who are atheistic, who are egalitarian. So they represent the radical edge of the Enlightenment, and Britain in turn defines itself as a conservative Christian nation. Propagating some idea of science or a history of the world or a criticism of the Bible is a very dangerous thing. Publishers who are printing and selling books by Tom Paine, the famous radical, are liable to be prosecuted for seditious libel. A teacher who translates Voltaire, the great French

Enlightenment thinker, into English is put into the pillory and dies when he's in the pillory. Oh wow. When you say pillory, just very quickly for listeners, is that what we call the stocks? It is. So fun at a fate now, but obviously not when it's used properly. Hilarious when your teacher does it and you throw a cabbage at their head. Yeah, exactly. Reserved in the late 18th century for truly serious crimes like translating. So what people

are doing instead is practicing what's called natural theology, which was an idea developed by the English clergyman William Paley, which is that if you are investigating the world, if you're practicing what eventually we call science, you're not doing anything blasphemous. You're in fact understanding the works of the Lord. Charles Darwin, I believe, that must have had a huge influence on lots and lots of naturalists, that whole thing of I'm studying it because I love God and I want to find out more about his works rather than... So Darwin certainly as a young man has no reason to doubt, he later recalls, about the

truth of the Bible. He only loses his faith in the 1850s whenever his daughter dies. The interesting person I want to chuck at, have you ever heard of James Usher? Bishop James Usher or Archbishop James Usher? He tries to pull off a really quite impressive thing. He tries to date the world by using the Bible. Oh yes, okay, so I'm aware of that. Sort of adding all the ages up backwards and then going to about 5,000 years. Tell us who he is, Michael, and then give us his sort of best guess. Okay, so James Usher is a Dubliner who during the 17th century rises up through the ranks

of the established Anglican Church in Ireland and eventually becomes the Archbishop of Armagh, which is the top job in that religion in Ireland. Now, during the English Civil War, he finds himself in England and marooned over there. He busies himself by putting together his biblical chronology. In the 17th century, this was regarded as a groundbreaking, really sophisticated way of understanding not only the world, but also the Lord's role in shaping the world. So what he does is he looks through Roman history, Greek history, Persian history, Babylonian history, marries it up to things that happen in the Bible, then he gets back into those really tedious verses about X beginning Y beginning Z beginning Z, and where he ends up, really

quite conveniently, for him anyway, is on the night between the 22nd and the 23rd of October in 4004 BC. Now, why is this convenient? Well, there was an assumption that there had been 2000 years of nature, 2000 years of law under the Torah. And the 4 BC is because if we understand that Herod the Great was in charge at the time of the census in the Bible, well Herod the Great died in 4 BC. Heather- Hang on, I've just found a glaring error in the Bible. So Herod died four years before Christ. Yeah, apparently he was the one that they were hiding. Hang on. I mean, this is why as a historian, I think I've just lost my face. This is why as a historian, I use

BCE rather than BC. Yeah, because I would make the argument that Christ was alive but was born four years before Christ. He was lying about his age. He's lying about his age trying to get into a nightclub. I'm still 30, honest. So you said Michael that Usher's maths takes him to the 23rd of October, possibly 22nd of October. Which is my mum's birthday. Oh perfect, good. 4004 BC.

So we now know that our planet is 4.54 billion years old. So Usher was... How did we get there? We ended up with all the names. So Usher is out, he's ever so slightly out with 4004 BC. And at that point, sorry to interdote, that was so old it sounded correct to your average person. You believe in the truth of the Bible for one thing, but also there had been other people

in other civilisations, in China, in Italy, in France, coming up with their own calculations. And Usher was roughly in the ballpark. But what really makes the difference, at least in the English speaking world, is that in 1701, whenever new versions of the King James Bible are being printed and being taken by people who are emigrating to the colonies in America, they decide to stick 4004 BC, the first verse of the first chapter of Genesis. Even though lots of people, intelligent people who are looking at geology and who are looking at the world, begin to understand that we can't stand by this date of 4004 BC. They had seen geological processes and they understood that we've got more than 6000 years to deal with

here. So let's return to Mary clinging to the cliffs in Dorset at Lyme Regis and let's get to her first big discovery, the one that starts to make her name. How old was she when she found it, Sarah? Oh, okay, so she was struck by a lightning, she was 14 months old. And then in that time, you know, she's lost siblings, her dad is tired.

So I want to imagine now she's a teenager. So let's say she's 17. That's a good guess. She's 12. Oh God, poor Mary. So she's learned to read and write, and then it's set to start finding fossils. Yeah, out on the cliff face. Yeah. And the first one that she finds, Michael,

is the ichthyosaur, is that right? Yeah, it becomes known as the ichthyosaurus. So colloquially, it might have been termed a sea dragon at the time. The ichthyosaurus actually means a fish lizard. Her brother Joseph found the skull first. The skull had been rested from the cliffs and it fell down onto the beach, but he had to go back and do upholstery so the family could eat. So he tasked Mary with finding the rest of the skeleton. And it took her a while, it took her almost a year to do it, but eventually they piece everything together. And what happens is that whenever this new fossilised skeleton is presented to science, nobody really knows what to make of it, because nothing like it has ever been seen before.

So what was your greatest achievement at 12? At 12? Oh god. So if I admit this, I mean, so at 12 I was out of school for six months, so I was at home by myself eating Bourbon biscuits and making hot chocolate, watching Neighbours twice, because it used to be on twice a day. Were you checking to see if the second episode was the same? There just was nothing on television. I'm aging myself now like a dinosaur fossil. There used to be only four channels. I remember those days, yes.

What happens to the skeleton of this sort of ichthyosaurus then? Is it taken by science? Is it sold to a sort of gentleman collector who's like, ooh fancy, I'll put it in the lounge. What happens to it? Both of those things. So the skeleton's lifted up out of the ground, it's put together, and it's bought by Henry Host Henley, who's the local Lord of the Manor, and he also incidentally owns Sandringham House, which is now owned by the Royal Family. But he doesn't keep it. Instead, he gives it over to Museum Piccadilly in London, and that's where all of the clever men of the capital go to look at it.

So the great scientific institution would be the Linnaean Society, named after Carl Linnaeus. So are they going to sort of take a look at this and give it a name? They will, but also the geographical society is looking at it, the geological society, and there are eventually a string of papers before the Royal Society itself. So this is definitely something that has captivated the interest of all of the places in Britain where scientific opinion is formed. Is this monetisizable for her? Yeah, it is. It's, I think, £20? Yeah, £23.

£23. So, you know, that's a lot of money for them. You can survive for a year on that. Yeah. So a 12-year-old girl has found a brand new... I forgot she was 12. I just forgot she was 12. She's been a year. She's been a year doing it. She's been a year. So she must have been such an obsessive, such a stubborn person already. And it's very dangerous this, you know, her dad fell off a cliff and died.

Her dog later on falls off a cliff and dies. Her dog Trey, who's in the famous painting of her, he falls off a cliff and dies. So this is a very, very dangerous way to spend your days as a 12 year old. And so do we know anything about what she was wearing? How she, like, she weathered this? There's a painting of her and there's a statue of her and they're based on the same one. Yeah, the painting is posthumous. So it's a recreation of what we think she looked like as an adult. She didn't keep a diary.

There are notebooks. Yeah, yeah. No, I mean, the painting is her and sort of like a big sort of coat frock and a kind of bonnet, isn't it? With a bonnet and a basket for collecting the fossils and her loyal dog walking in front of her. Yeah, and a hammer for chiseling away at the old bones. So she's got a look, she's out on the cliffs and she's found this amazing thing, this ichthyosaurus. So she found it in 1811 and then in 1831 she sent a letter with some drawings of ichthyosaurus. We want to show them to you so you can describe them for our listeners.

Oh wow, okay. So here they come. So one of them looks like it's got two eyes or boobs, a very thick column of spine down it. You can't tell which end is which, no offence to Mary. I think maybe drawing was not a forte. If your five year old drew it, you'd say, oh, it's a spiky, scary man. The one that's lower down with her handwriting, I think, on it as well. So it looks a bit more like a crocodile head, as he said, or a long shark head, many, many teeth, lots and lots of vertebrae. There's wings on it or fins. Fins, I suppose. Flippers, aren't they?

Flippers, yeah. Yeah, that's what everyone's excited about and it's not the only marine animal that Mary found. So a decade later in her mid-20s, she's now a young woman, she discovers a complete plesiosaurus, Michael. What's a plesiosaurus when it's at home? So a plesiosaurus or a plesiosaurus, the name means near lizard. So there had been other bits and pieces of ancient reptiles found about the south-west of England. A clergyman called William Coneybear had thought that this would be the next great discovery. The week before Christmas in 1823, Marie does make this discovery. She finds this enormous creature, again, nothing quite like it has

been seen before. It's later memorably described as a serpent threaded through the body of a turtle. It becomes in time the inspiration for the Loch Ness Monster. And Marianne's Plesiosaurus is up on the walls in the Natural History Museum and it's like an ancient reptile. Instead of Han Solo in the Carbonite, it looks like a Plesiosaurus in the Carbonite reaching through the ancient material. And so this is 1823 she finds this one. So she's found one every 12 years so far. So 1823, she's found one every 12 years, it's a good innings. She's finding other stuff in between I think, but nothing is exciting.

It'd be hard to get the dopamine. If you've found a really, really massive sea dragon at 12, every time you've got, oh it's just another little handheld one. Yeah, you've peaked haven't you? It's another Ammonite, yeah. Bore Bellenite. Yeah, I'll sell it for a quid. I mean, we've mentioned already a couple of names. The name I want to bring in is that

he's a Frenchman, Baron Georges Cuvier. How does he get involved? So Cuvier is effectively the Napoleon of natural sciences in the early 19th century. Constantly invading other people's collections. Indeed, he is the grand master, so he runs all of these scientific institutions in Paris, which are incredibly well funded. Whenever British scientists go over to Paris to visit them, to pay homage to him, to attend his soirees, which are the most important gatherings in European science, they are incredibly jealous of all the resources that he has at his disposal. And before the learned men of Britain really want to make a big announcement, they really want QVA's approval. So eventually they get his approval about the plesiosaurus, which

he had maybe slightly doubted beforehand, and the Annings sell it. They sell it for 100 pounds, which is an enormous amount of money in the 1820s. And they sell to Richard Grenville who's the Duke of Buckingham and a notorious spendthrift who was spending money left right and centre and because the plesiosaurus is so big, well it's shipped by boat all the way up into London. In fact it's so big the geological society whenever they get it they can't move it upstairs so they all have to peer in the gloom in the hallway at it. Wow. Then in 1828 she finds another funspee. She's a pterosaur, a flying reptile. Wow. And this is only five years after the last discovery, so she's improving her rate.

Do we know anything about what she believed at this point? Was she looking for proof of something or was she just looking to see what's there? Well, there is nothing in the evidence we have about Mary Anne to suggest that any of her discoveries caused her to doubt in the existence of God, or that minimised or diminished her Christian faith. What she does really, really perceptively notice during the 1820s and the 1830s is that there is much less difference between the creatures of the ancient world and the creatures of today. And that's incredibly prescient because 30 or 40 years later people will use fossil reptiles to prove the truth of evolution.

So that's really fascinating. And there's also another person we should mention is William Buckland, who's a fun character in his own right. Churchman and scientist, often at war with his own sense of what he believed, I guess, but he has a lovely quote, doesn't he? He does. So Buckland, who is a Church of England minister and an Oxford Fellow, at the time everybody was both of those things at once, it was almost obligatory. And so whenever he's describing Mariannig's pterosaur, which is named the dimorphodon macronix, he says, it somewhat resembled our modern bats and vampires, but had its beak elongated like the bill of a woodcock, and armed with teeth like the snout of a crocodile. Its vertebrate

ribs, pelvis, legs and feet resembled those of a lizard. Its three anterior fingers terminated in long hooked claws like that on the forefinger of a bat, and over its body was a covering of scaly armour like that of an iguana. In short, it was a monster resembling nothing that has ever been seen or heard of upon Earth, excepting the dragons of romance and heraldry. Yeah, I mean this is a flying monster. Yes, and he uses the phrase like bats and vampires, like they are equivalents. Yeah, and he spells it vampire with a Y, vampira, proper gothic. Marianne has found sea dragons, she's finding flying dragons,

it's you know you've got to catch them all, it's Pokemon stuff. I'm assuming that there must have been such excitement generated by this, obviously it's a time when it wouldn't have been you know internet or telephones but that people have been a flurry of what would it telegrams, letter writing, would it be reported in the newspapers? Oh yeah, there's lots of stuff. So the discovery of the Plesiosaurus is it's not exactly headline news, it's on the front page of the newspapers? Oh yeah, there's lots of stuff. So the discovery of the Plesiosaurus is, it's not exactly headline news, it's on the front page of the newspapers in 1823 and 1824. And we know that news of the discoveries is being pumped all around the British Empire. So the Madras Courier in southern India is carrying news of these discoveries. And did anyone not believe in them?

Not so much as disbelieving that there are these fossils, but what is their importance? What do they signify? That's the really important question. So, Mary-Annie, by this point, has been drawing the attention of William Buckland, who's the sort of the big daddy in England or Britain. You've got Cuvier in France. She's got the two giants in the field to take notice. She's now renowned as a paleontologist, a rock star paleontologist. But there was one thing she never discovered in her whole career in 35 years of digging. Do you know what that was, Sarah? True love? No.

One thing she doesn't find is a dinosaur. Ah, we're quibbling. We are quibbling, but in some ways we're not quibbling. So how are we defining dinosaur then? So a dinosaur is a land dwelling reptile. And in particular, a land dwelling reptile, where the hips and the legs are constructed underneath the trunk of the body.

So originally, whenever we began discovering dinosaurs, and Buckland has already announced the first one in 1824, which is the megalosaurus, Gideon Mantell, who's a surgeon from Sussex, the next year announces the Iguanodon. They think that they are slithering along the ground like we would think of crocodiles, with the legs jutting out. But dinosaurs, they will stand upright with the legs underneath them. Yeah, so that's a dinosaur. So Mary Anning never found a technical dinosaur. Because these are sea-dwelling or flying.

Yeah, yeah. I'm going to say, to me, she's a dinosaur discoverer. Okay, okay. She also contributed to our knowledge of other sort of slightly less glamorous, you know, she's finding plenty of the kind of ammonites and belomnites. What's the other one? Coprolites. Ah, yes. Do you know what a coprolite is, Sarah? A coprolite, I don't know. Do you know what light means in Greek? No, I don't. Okay, it means stone.

Okay. It's a lithos stone. Okay. And copron in ancient Greek means turd. Oh, so fossilized turds. Fossilized turds, Michael. Which is very important in terms of what animals were eating. And yeah.

Really important, can reveal a lot about them. Yeah, where they dwelled, how far they travelled. Yeah. Yeah, very important stuff. Yeah, so fossilised poos. There's a lovely fossilised Viking poo in the Yorvik Museum in York. If you want to see a very huge fossilised poo.

There's a reason the Kate Winslet movie's not called Coprolite, because then the movie would literally be, well, a bunch of old crap. Yeah. But it might have been anyway. So in terms of the way that she was making her living, I mean, could it just be that she was so passionate about her career and her job and because she made money she didn't need to marry? That would have been incredibly rare, but she

would have had the choice, I guess. From everything that we know of her, she was quite a solitary person. I mean, certainly hunting for fossils is something that you can do alone. And if your dog's falling off a cliff, you're not going to risk a husband weighing you down, carrying your basket. She's lost her father, her brother's still alive, her mum's still alive. And she's very, very close to her mother. And she does make friends among some of the geologists who come down to Lime Regis or the seasonal tourists who come down

as well and there are reminiscences of Mary Anning in their memoirs. But so far as we know there was never any kind of serious romantic relationship. Hello I'm Brian Cox. I'm Robin Ince. The Infinite Monkey Cage is back and we are starting the series with a whole show about trees with Dame Judi Dench. What else have we got Brian? We're going to do What a Gas with Mark Miodownik. Unexpected Science History with Rufus Hound. I don't know what he knows about unexpected science history. Well that's the unexpected thing, he hasn't got a clue. No, I'm hoping we're having some experts on there.

Exploring with Annika Rice. No, that's just one of your dreams. The other night I dreamt I was exploring with Annika Rice. And also Alien Life in Glastonbury with Chris Lintol. Yeah, infinite monkey cage. Listen, wherever you get your podcasts. OK, so 1842 is when the word dinosaur is coined. Is that right? It might have been 1841, but certainly it's in the 1840s.

And so we had discovered creatures that we knew of or that would become known as dinosaurs by then. We've mentioned Buckland discovering the megalosaurus, which the original remains of which had actually been found in the 17th century. And people wondered whether or not they had been the bones of elephants that the Roman army might have brought over to Britain. Somebody also at the time described them as the scrotum humanum, because they thought it resembled a particular part of the human anatomy, but we're sticking with the name Aemegalosaurus, I think. There also had been the iguanodon. You might know it's got this, you know, the spiky thumb.

Richard Owen, who eventually coins the term dinosaur, thought that belonged in its skull, but it doesn't, it wasn't the thumb. But Owen, who is maybe the most important zoologist and the biggest mover and shaker and the greatest scientific administrator of Victorian science, he coins the term dinosaur. And he does it for perverse political reasons, because Owen despises the idea of evolution. People have been talking for decades about developmental theory, the idea that species could transmute and improve and progress and get better. But that was a dangerous idea because it presupposed that the Lord had made mistakes at the beginning of creation and that animals were capable

of doing better what the Lord had done. So Owen decided that he would create this category of creatures known as dinosaurs because his argument was if the most magnificent, sophisticated, terrifying reptiles of all time had been alive at the beginning of time, and we compare them to today's reptiles, then evolution would be bunk. Because things are getting worse, right? The best stuff's at the beginning. Oh, so it wasn't that there wasn't change, it was that it was change. It was a degeneration rather than a progressive improvement. I see. And Richard Owen, there's a statue of him in the Natural History Museum, isn't there?

When you walk in, you sort of see him. Spit on it when you walk past. Don't spit on it. There is a really appropriately, he's staring about five yards away directly at Thomas Huxley, his great enemy. Oh lovely. That's what they've got at Parliament with Oliver Cromwell and Charles I. I love those.

Yeah, statues of war is good, isn't it? So when we say Mary Anning is digging up stuff out of Cliffs, Sarah, we shouldn't undersell her talent intellectually. What do you imagine she was thinking when she's digging these things up? Well, to put as much time into it as she did at such a young age, it can't just have been monetary. There would have been, you know, a reason that propels you to go out and find something that can be sold, but for her to have spent a year digging something out, she must have

had a huge curiosity. It's one of those things of like, is it possible? And what does it mean? Is the next thing. And then to be the discoverer of something at such a young age, that would be incredibly formative, because there are people with PhDs, this is someone, you know, barely learned to be able to write and read, who is making massive discoveries that are changing the world, changing how very educated religious men, men with titles are

talking about the world. If she was a horrible person with a massive ego, I would forgive that. Because, I mean, to have so little and to make such a huge change in the world is incredibly rare, isn't it? Yeah, it's amazing. She certainly knows how intelligent she is. Does she? Good. Yeah. And she gets the papers sent down from the London Scientific Societies and she really relishes reading what all of these grand men have written. About her and about our discoveries. Well, at least about the discoveries that she has made and pointing out where they've gone wrong. And whenever people come down to Lyme Regis, all the geologists do this. They don't come to pay homage, however,

they basically exploit her, which is one of the really dark sides of this story. So Richard Owen jokes about running down to Lyme Regis to make love to Mary Anning and Gideon Mantell, who discovers the Iguanodon, says he's really unimpressed by this sour, prim, vinegar looking woman sitting in her shop selling fossils. Others are much more generous. So the widow of the senior judge at the Old Bailey comes down to Lyme Regis and she credits Anne with knowing immediately whenever she looks at a bone exactly what kind of creature, what species it comes from. Anne realizes this too. She eventually becomes quite bitter that she's being used by all of these men, that they are making great names for themselves off her discoveries. And I think fairly so. Well, from everything you've just said, she's not getting the due respect as an intelligent person. It's like she's the delivery driver or something

rather than, or you know, she's the muscle. She's the muscle getting them out. That's right, she's the excavator, she's the JCB. But you can't do it by potluck as you say. Of course she'd be able to tell the bones because otherwise she'd be wasting her time digging up everything going, is that a thing? Is that a thing? Is that a leg? Is that a leg? I'll send it to London. Okay, sorry. Was it rubbish? All right. You're absolutely right. So she's an autodidact in some way. She's teaching herself. She's learning on the job and she's obviously incredibly knowledgeable. So not just a practical digger,

not just brave, but also increasingly an anatomist of tremendous skill. But she's also unmarried, she's a lower class woman, she's from Dorset. Yeah, and she doesn't have male protection. And we're still talking about a time where you know, women were, you're either going to be charmed or ignored. And this whole idea that like a vinegary woman, it's like, oh, was she not, did she not ask you to dance? Like, you wouldn't say, you just wouldn't treat a male intellectual that way and go, he was just sitting there with his books. And we think, or at least I think, she left Lyme Regis only once in her life. Roderick

Murkison, who was one of these great geologists, his wife Charlotte became friends with Mary whenever they went down to Lyme Regis and eventually Charlotte invites Mary up to London for a brief holiday and Mary's beside herself with excitement and is in some ways nervous as well and is absolutely wowed and awed by the sights and sounds and smells of the capital. But really she is in isolation in Dorset in Lyme Regis for much of her life. Because Mary Anning is not allowed to join the geological society, right? She is not. The Royal Society won't have a... Nope. So none of them allow women to join?

No, and when did... Has that changed? It has changed. Thank you. God, if you looked me in the way, Michael was like, oh no. Still, they didn't know that any women are scientists. So why can't... She's proved herself over and over. Why can't she join these societies, these scientific institutions? She's proved herself a scientist. Well, in the mindset of the time, it's just not over and over. Why can't she join these societies, these scientific institutions? She's proved herself a scientist. Well, in the mindset of the time,

it's just not the done thing. Because she's a woman? Yeah. And the class? And a lower class woman. Right, okay. So I think a really telling example of this, and I was maybe gonna save it for the nuance window,

is that in the early 1830s, whenever the British Association for the Advancement of Science is set up, as an institution which will bring within science Men of lower income so middle-class men can join this and can listen to all the great men speak They're holding a meeting at Oxford and they have a massive discussion about whether or not they should invite women now William Buckland for all of his Geniality suggests that women would just be a distraction and if they were to attend they would reduce the status of this August meeting to London Mayfair

dilettantes gathering together for drinks. So they eventually decide on a compromise that even eminent women such as Mary Somerville, a physicist and mathematician after whom Oxford College is now named, is only allowed to attend the dinners and the conversational soirees. For somebody like Mary Anning, no invitation at all. Yeah. But Mary Anning was recognised, there's someone called Louis Agassiz, is that right? Yeah, so during her lifetime, Louis Agassiz did name two species of fish after her, and then after Mary's death, there was a species of ichthyosaur which was named after her. Right, okay. So two species of fish for a lifetime of work.

And we don't know how she felt about it, or do we? Oh we do. She was increasingly bitter about how she had been treated unkindly by the world. Yeah. And would walk along the beach in Limerie just giving off to anybody who would accompany her about all the young idiots who were coming down and enjoying themselves, not necessarily at her expense, but without giving her the credit that she deserved. But she was bringing the people in, right? So there's a sort of paradox, right? And her fame is quite well established. People are coming to visit Marianne, and yet at the same time... They're not paying their proper dues. Everyone thinks this has happened by accident, rather

than because she is a very, very bright and brilliant woman. She is a seam of gold to be mined. So how do you think Mary was cashing in on her ability at least to draw in punters, people coming down to see the stuff? Well I would hope that she would be maybe teaching, demonstrating, showing people how she worked, was it that kind of thing? Doing all sorts of tours. Yeah, touring I guess, if I work. Yeah, find out what I saw and where I found it. That little hole there's where daddy hit the ground. That's where Trey died, yeah, my dog, my lovely dog. I mean, is she doing tours? Is she doing day trips? She's not doing that, but she's set up her own fossil shop.

So eventually she's selling enough that she earns enough money to buy a place where she and her mother can live. And they live above their fossil depot. So women owning property is huge, actually, at that time as well, because you couldn't get a mortgage. You had to buy it outright. That's interesting, yeah.

So that's massive. Right. And it called Annings Fossil Depot. Yeah. Which is quite a good name. Fantastic name. So she got a fossil depot named after her. That's better than a fish. Yeah because a depot feels very like that's where you go to sort of pick up your post after it's got lost in the mail somewhere. It doesn't feel very fancy. It's not fossil emporium. But there is something about it that feels quite charming. Yeah, I just love how this woman takes control of her own life, even down to this, because you say in terms of being bitter, I think rightly so. She was failed, actually, by the people who should have been her peers, and perhaps we lost out on a brilliant brain that we could have utilised more. But she just, she did very practical things constantly,

didn't she? Yeah, but her reputation is international. She has one very fancy guest from quite far away. Do you want to guess who? Michelle Obama. Shakira. It's gonna be a great powerful woman. The Joan of Arc. I love all these guys. No, the King of Saxony in 1844. So a king shows up in Mary Anning's fossil depot. That's a proper coup, isn't it? It is. So she is internationally renowned. The directors of museums in New York come to buy fossils from Mary Anning. Swiss naturalists pay repeated visits to lime regions to come and see her. And in the 1840s, when he's touring Britain incognito because he can't be bothered with all the official events, the King of Saxony and his doctor come down to Lyon Regis. They are impressed with what they see in the

Anning Fossil Depot. They buy a perfect ichthyosaur and whenever they ask for her name, she writes it in the doctor's pocketbook and says, I am well known across all of Europe. Good for her. What would the Pasco Depot sell if you were going to run your own shop? So at the moment what I've got is loads of Pepper Pig sets that my toddler... Pasco's Pepper Pigs is quite good. Yeah, secondhand Pepper Pigs. They sort of disprove evolution. One of them does run an ice cream van, which I guess is advanced for a pig, but pigs can't do that anymore. So we should have stuck with God's vision.

Nice. I think I'd open a newsagent called the General Store with my name Jenna. I love a pun in a title. I do, yeah. So that's what I'd go for. Oh, I see. Yeah. Well, then mine would have to be Do Not Pasco and it would be Monopoly stuff. Oh, that's pretty good.

We're doing puns. And you could do Taylor's Taylor. Yeah, I know. I'm just going to have to go with it. It and it would be monopoly stuff. That's pretty good. We're doing puns. Ah, and you could do Taylor's Taylor. Yeah, I'm just going to have to go with it. It's too obvious to do anything else. You could be a Taylor Swift shop. It could be a Taylor's Taylor's. That would be better. There you go.

Taylor's Taylor Swifties. I think it should be making tails for people, but literally a tailor. Dinosaur tails. People come in and say, you know, judge my aura. What's my personality? And you give them a nice wagging tail Okay, that's

Existed now if you don't do it Michael. I'm gonna do it. That's my shot I thought you meant like a dinosaur tail then I thought you mean like there's intact There's like like a tail like people wear festival tails sometimes don't they I do not know what you're talking about, but okay Yeah But I would like the idea that it would suit your personality. Gotcha. And what would your tale be? Labradors, like a yellow, waggy one. Okay, just really enthusiastic.

Yeah, just like, oh, what's up with that? Oh, cool, cool, yeah, right to me. So, I mean, Michael, the King of Saxony's shown up and he's bought some lovely, he's bought an ichthyosaurus, so she's got some cash. Does that mean we can say at last, Marianning, comfortable security, you know, retirement plan, pension scheme, she's going to live a life of, you know, not necessarily international glamour, but she's fine? I'm afraid not. All the way through her life it remains a struggle because, you know, there are stories which arise from these big finds and these big sales, but they might only happen once every few years or maybe even once a decade. So we have repeatedly people offering their charity to her. So we

have towards the end of her life, some of the London institutions subscribing and giving her a pension. In roundabout 1820, a British army officer retired on half pay, deciding that because the Annings are in such dire straits, they've already sold all the furniture and the contents of their house in order to pay their rent, that he will sell all of the things that he's collected in Lyon Regions in the southwest of England, so all the fossils that he has managed to bring together. So that's when she's 21, so that's when she's quite young, isn't it? Already they're in trouble and they're relying on... It's a constant struggle. There is never really any stage during her life, even after being able to buy and live in the Anning Fossil Depot, that they are completely comfortable and secure. With her brother Joseph, the dad had been a cabinet maker, had been very hard living. When he decides to be an upholsterer, you

would be like, you sure you don't want to be a vicar? You know, something more reliable, something a little house for free kind of thing. But I think be a vicar. It's only more reliable, something with a house for free kind of thing. But I think becoming a vicar requires an awful lot of education. Oh, I see. And a high degree of A for that. Yeah, yeah. I mean, they're also, I've got here that the British government sort of briefly sort of went, we should probably give Mary Anne some sort of pension.

And the British Association for the Advancement of Science raised some cash as well for her. So by the end, but this is the 18... This is 1838. So not the end of her life, but sort of in middle age. They're already, there are handouts coming from people with deep pockets going, well, we should probably not let her starve. Yeah, there is an eventual recognition that Anning has given so much to science that science really should give something back. Recognition that Anning has given so much to science that science really should give something back But as she reaches her 40s life doesn't necessarily get any easier her mother dies eventually And she had probably been closer to her mother than anybody else and in her diary her notebook She writes oh, I weep that I am all alone. I am all alone After that Mary herself then develops cancer and in the last few years of her life

She's using opium and alcohol to numb the pain. Yeah, it's a really sad end to her life. She died of breast cancer in 1847. So she was about 47 years old, maybe 48. Joseph, her brother, died two years later. Three years after her death, there is a nice tribute to her. So there is a stained glass window commemorating her in a church in Lyon Regis and Henry de la Beach, who's a pioneering geologist who had come down to Lyon Regis quite a lot, does

give a eulogy to her in his presidential address to the Geological Society. So she is remembered, but I think more recognition during and maybe even more rewards in her lifetime would have been more fitting. A comfortable lifetime as well as knowing you're going to have a legacy. I guess no one really is aware of their own importance during their lifetime and I don't know what comfort that would be. Yeah, it's nice to be well loved but it's also nice to have enough money for next week's dinner.

Not be selling your furniture. Not be selling your furniture, yeah. I mean it's really sad. Or dependent on other people. Mary Anning now I think is much more famous, you know, school kids across the country know who she is. There is a statue of her, she's on stamps. She's up there with Darwin now and it's kind of sad to see at the time, even though she was recognized by people and scientists like, well, she's done important work. Yeah. She struggled. But they didn't know how important yet, did they? I mean, there was so much story left to come

and then based on her findings. Yeah. Because at the beginning I guess they couldn't really know, how could they know what was about to come in science? Yeah. And artists always die poor don't they? I hope not. So before we finish let's see one of the illustrations that Henry de la Beach created, which was based on Anning's finds. So Mary had found these things through her career. Henry de la Beach, who gave this lovely address about her, he did an art piece called a Duria antiquiore, lovely bit of Latin, which means a more ancient Dorset. And we're going to show it to you. His drawing is much better than hers. Sorry Mary! So obviously technically there's no dinosaurs in this picture of dinosaurs. There's something about those

crocodile-y mouths that do look smiley, don't they? And they've got the big boggly eyes that she did so they do look very friendly. It's very kind of kids book. It is, yeah. I guess it's either that or Terra. You have to go one way or the other and then the flying ones But we have got an ichthyosaur eating another Or something being eaten. What's being eaten? Who's getting munched? So we have an we have an ichthyosaur chomping down on the neck of a plesiosaur Pterosaurs in the sky. We've got Ammonites and Bellum Knights decorating the shore and we've even got coprolites. We've even got some ancient shit.

Yay! And only 5,000 years ago. Ha ha ha! The Nuance Window! [♪ theme music playing on the radio and TV screen. The Nuance Window theme song plays. It's time now for The Nuance Window. This is the part of the show where Sarah and I settle down on the sand with our rockhammers, and we allow Dr Michael to tell us something we need to know about Mary Anning. You have two minutes, so without

much further ado, take it away Michael. So as much as we have discussed how Mary Anning made all of these really extraordinary discoveries but still failed to receive the due reward and recognition because of her sex during her lifetime, it's really important to recognise that she was not alone in this. We've already mentioned very briefly about how the British Association for the Advancement of Science decided not to invite women, even eminent physicists like Mary Somerville, to the main events at their meeting at Oxford. But many of the other key men in this period in geology and paleontology relied heavily upon the work of their wives. So William Buckland had met his wife Mary in a stagecoach and they bonded over the work

of Georges Cuvier. But Mary Buckland would go on to write many of William Buckland's treatises. He would dictate it, she would write it down. She also played a key role in many of his experiments. Whenever Buckland was trying to work out which reptile could have created certain footprints, it was Mary Buckland who had the idea to roll a slab of dough and to place their family tortoise on it. And by doing so, she allowed her husband to recognise those footprints as belonging to a tortoise. Gideon Mantell was the Sussex surgeon, and geologist and paleontologist who discovered the iguanodon and later the hyaliosaurus. There has been some debate about whether or not it was actually his wife who first discovered the fossils

which gave rise to the discovery of the iguanodon. And Charlotte Merkison, Mary Anning's friend, who was of a much higher class, was married to Roderick Merkison who was a key figure in the early development of geology. And in the late 1820s, whenever Charles Lyell, the famous geologist who would go on to upturn everybody's idea about the age of the earth and geological processes, was marching through the south of France and down into Italy with Roderick Merkerson, it was Charlotte Merkerson who was accompanying them and planning their route and making sure that everything went to plan. So in this early period of the 19th century, Marianning was not alone.

Thank you, Michael. Sarah? I think the difficulty with the way that history has historically been told is that there are brilliant men and it's very difficult to be brilliant by yourself and the thankless or the it's very difficult to be brilliant by yourself. And the thankless or the wife title, taking away from what sounds like they are teams, they are teams of people working together. And because of the way society treated women or women's plays, you just, yeah, it's much easier for it to go under the man's name. There was absolutely no point saying Andy's wife. Or also, you know, she was actually there. I mean, who wanted to listen to that? So at least hopefully we're getting a little bit better at realising that people don't do things in a vacuum and the people around them were

part of it. So what do you know now? Time now for the So What Do You Know Now? This is our quickfire quiz for Sarah to see how much she has learned. Sarah, you are renowned as a brilliant brain. Are you feeling confident? Has it all gone in? Oh, my brain is fizzing. I'm desperate to discover a dinosaur. If there's one in Finsbury Park, I'm going to get him. Okay, we've got 10 questions for you. These are all things we've talked about.

Question one, here we go. Where in Dorset did Mary Anning live and do most of her fossil hunting? Lime Ridge is shown left once. Very, very good. Question two, what dramatic event occurred to Mary Anning when she was 14 months old? She was struck by lightning at a horse show. I love the way you're answering like it's mastermind. Quickly, come on, stop chatting! What notable fossil did Mary and her brother Joseph find when she was only 12?

Icheosaurus. It was Icheosaurus, very good. Question four, what happened to Mary Anning's beloved pet Trey? Trey, alas, went the way of her father and fell off a cliff. Yes 1833, very sad, poor Trey. But he's in the lovely statue now, you can go see. You keep saying that like anyone cares about a statue when they're dead. Go see the statue, it's very nice. Question five. On which date did James Usher, Archbishop of Armagh, claim that the Earth was founded?

Oh, 4004 BC. Very good. 22nd slash 23rd of October. Oh, you're so good at this. Question six. What did Mary Anning technically never discover? A dinosaur. Correct. Question seven. Why couldn't Mary Anning join the Geological Society of London? Yeah, why? Because she was the gentlest sex, she was a woman. And also lower class as well. And she should have been in the kitchen, you know. Question eight, what

was the name of Mary Anning's shop in Lyme Regis? It was called the Anning Fossil Depot. It was! Very charming. Question 9. During her lifetime two species of which animal were named after Mary? Fish. It was fish. And this for a perfect 10 out of 10. Which of Mary Anning's amazing finds did Baron George Cuvier initially think was a forgery? Oh was it so it was the playasaur? It was a playasaur, very good 10 out of 10. 10 out of ten. My work here is done. It's an incredible performance.

I was never in doubt, but it's always lovely to see it proved. I've just heard, Michael, that you were on Mastermind, so Sarah's tactic is obviously paralleled there. It was, but I did nothing as good as that. I won University Challenge in 2015 as well. Hey, look at this. Got two quiz. I've never got ten out of 10 on dinosaurs. Or not dinosaurs.

Fantastic well well done Sarah. Thank you Michael and and listener if you want to hear more of Sarah You can check out our episode on Queen Boudicca by scrolling all the way down on the app forevermore Just keep scrolling keep scrolling it. It's there 2019. For more Marys, we have episodes on Wollstonecraft, Shelley and Seacole. And if you've enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review, share the show with your friends, subscribe to your Dead to Me on BBC sound so you never miss an episode. I'd just like to say a huge thank you to our guests in History Corner. We had the tremendous Dr Michael Taylor. Thank you, Michael. Thank you, Greg for having me pleasure and in Comedy

Corner we have the sensational Sarah Pasco thank you Sarah thank you and to you lovely listener join me next time as we dig up more hidden historical treasures but for now I'm off to go and stand in the lightning storm to supercharge my intellect this episode of your dead to me was researched by Annabelle Storr, it was written by Emiro's Price Goodfellow, Emma Nagoose and me, the audio producer was Steve Hanke and our production coordinator was Ben Hollands. It was produced by Emiro's Price Goodfellow, me and senior producer Emma Nagoose and our

executive editor was James Cook. How would a World Heavyweight Boxing Champion cope if they were left alone on a desert island? When you're preparing for a fight, a big part of it is isolation, this preparation to get ready for battle and to be victorious. Hello, I'm Lauren Laverne, presenter of Desert Island Discs from BBC Radio 4, and I'm here to tell you about a very special castaway, the world heavyweight boxing champion, Anthony Joshua. When you look at a lion and they're showing affection, you think, oh, they're so amazing, I'd love to give one of those a cuddle.

Then you put a gazelle in front of a lion and you see its pupil widen. I feel we all have that nature, right? When it's time to eat, I love to hunt. That's just in my nature. Anthony Joshua on Desert Island Discs. Listen on BBC Sounds. Hello, I'm Brian Cox. I'm Robin Ince. The Infinite Monkey Cage is back and we are starting the series with a whole show about trees with Dame Judi Dench. What else have we got Brian? We're going to do What a Gas with Mark Miodownik. Unexpected Science History with Rufus Hound. I don't know what he knows about unexpected

science history. Well that's the unexpected thing, he hasn't got a clue. No, I'm hoping we're having some experts on there. Exploring with Annika Rice. No, that's just one of your dreams. The other night I dreamt I was exploring with Annika Rice. And also Alien Life in Glastonbury with Chris Lintol. Yeah. Infinite Monkey Cage. Listen, wherever you get your podcasts.