Mary Anning
The Fossil Hunter Who Rewrote the History of Life on Earth
- 13 chapters
- 35m
- Historical Biography
- Free · no sign-up
The book follows her career through key moments including the Birch auction where she sold important specimens, opening a fossil shop that grew her expertise in a dangerous profession. Chapters cover her work with plesiosaur remains, fossil fish, pterosaurs, and invertebrates. She interacted with prominent scientists despite being excluded from the Geological Society due to gender.
Anning's life shows how one woman's discoveries rewrote understanding of Earth's ancient history. Her financial struggles and church changes shaped her later years. The book ends with her recognition and memorial statue, showing how her legacy grew after death. Readers interested in women's contributions to science will find this biography essential.
Listen
-
Read this chapter
Mary Anning was born in Lyme Regis in Dorset, England, on 21 May 1799. Her father, Richard Anning, was a cabinetmaker and carpenter who supplemented his income by mining the coastal cliff-side fossil beds near the town, and selling his finds to tourists; her mother was Mary Moore, known as Molly. Anning's parents married on 8 August 1793 in Blandford Forum and moved to Lyme, living in a house built on the town's bridge. They attended the Dissenter chapel on Coombe Street, whose worshippers initially called themselves independents and later became known as Congregationalists. The family lived so near to the sea that the same storms that swept along the cliffs to reveal the fossils sometimes flooded the Annings' home, on one occasion forcing them to crawl out of an upstairs bedroom window to avoid drowning.
Molly and Richard Anning had ten children together. Their first child was a daughter named Mary, born in 1794. Another daughter died shortly after birth. Joseph followed in 1796, and then another son in 1798, who also died in infancy. In December of that year, their oldest child, the first Mary, who was four years old, died after her clothes caught fire. The incident happened while she was left alone in a room with wood shavings near a fire. The Bath Chronicle reported the tragedy on December 27, 1798, describing how the girl was "so dreadfully burnt as to cause her death."
Mary Anning was born five months after her dead sister, and thus named Mary after her. More children followed, but none lived past a year or two. Only the second Mary Anning and her brother Joseph, who was three years older, reached adulthood. The Anning family's high child mortality was common for the time. Nearly half the children born in the UK during the 19th century died before age five. In crowded Lyme Regis, diseases like smallpox and measles often claimed young lives.
On 19 August 1800, when Anning was just 15 months old, a lightning strike killed three women standing under an elm tree while watching a traveling equestrian show. The infant was being held by neighbor Elizabeth Haskings at the time. Onlookers rushed the baby home, where she was revived in hot water. A local doctor called her survival miraculous. Anning’s family said she had been a sickly baby before the event, but afterward she seemed to blossom. For years, community members attributed her curiosity, intelligence, and lively personality to that incident.
Mary Anning's education was extremely limited, but she was able to attend a Congregationalist Sunday school, where she learned to read and write. Congregationalist doctrine, unlike that of the Church of England at the time, emphasised the importance of education for the poor. Her prized possession was a bound volume of the Dissenters' Theological Magazine and Review, in which the family's pastor, the Reverend James Wheaton, had published two essays, one insisting that God had created the world in six days, the other urging dissenters to study the new science of geology.
-
Read this chapter
By the late 18th century, Lyme Regis had become a seaside resort, especially after 1792 when travel to Europe grew dangerous because of the French Revolutionary Wars. Tourists came to visit, and locals began selling "curios" to them—fossils with names like "snake-stones," "devil's fingers," and "verteberries." These were often believed to have healing or magical powers. Fossil collecting was popular at first as a hobby, but it gradually became more scientific as people learned about the importance of fossils to geology and biology. The fossils came from the Blue Lias, a geological layer along Lyme Regis's cliffs, formed in the Jurassic period about 210 to 195 million years ago. This area was one of Britain's richest fossil sites. The cliffs were unstable, especially in winter when rain caused landslides that often exposed new fossils, drawing collectors to the area during those months.
Their father, Richard, often took Mary and her brother Joseph on fossil-hunting expeditions to supplement the family's income, with Mary starting to join even as a young child of five or six years. They offered their discoveries for sale to tourists on a table outside their home. This was a difficult time for England's poor; the French Revolutionary Wars, and the Napoleonic Wars that followed, caused food shortages. The price of wheat almost tripled between 1792 and 1812, but wages for the working class remained almost unchanged. In Dorset, the rising price of bread caused political unrest, even riots. At one point, Richard Anning was involved in organising a protest against food shortages.
The Anning family faced extra hardship because they were religious dissenters, meaning they didn't follow the Church of England. In that time, people who refused to subscribe to the church's rules couldn't go to Oxford or Cambridge, weren't allowed in certain army roles, and were kept out of many jobs by law. The family's financial situation worsened when Anning's father died in November 1810 from tuberculosis and injuries from falling off a cliff. He left them with debts and no savings, so they had to apply for poor relief.
The family kept collecting and selling fossils together, setting up a table of curiosities near the coach stop at a local inn. While stories about Anning often focus on her successes, Dennis Dean notes that her mother and brother were also skilled collectors. Before the father's death, Anning's parents had already been selling fossils.
Their first well-known find was in 1811 when Mary Anning was twelve; her brother Joseph dug up a four-foot ichthyosaur skull, and a few months later in 1812, Anning herself found the rest of the skeleton, which turned out to be over five yards long. Henry Hoste Henley of Sandringham House paid the family about twenty-three pounds for it, and he sold it to William Bullock, who displayed it in London. There it generated interest as public awareness of the Earth’s age and prehistoric creatures grew. It was later sold for forty-five pounds and five shillings at auction in May 1819 as a "Crocodile in a Fossil State" to Charles Konig of the British Museum, who had already suggested the name Ichthyosaurus for it.
After Richard Anning's death, his wife Molly took over running the family fossil business, though it's unclear how much actual collecting she did herself. In 1821, she wrote to the British Museum asking for payment for a specimen. Her son Joseph was apprenticed to an upholsterer by then, but he stayed involved in the fossil trade at least until 1825. By that time, Mary had become the main person leading their family fossil business.
-
Read this chapter
Lieutenant-Colonel Thomas James Birch, later Bosvile, was the family’s most dedicated buyer, purchasing several fossils from them. In 1820, distressed by their growing poverty, he organized an auction of specimens he had bought from the Annings. He wrote to palaeontologist Gideon Mantell on March 5, explaining the sale was “for the benefit of the poor woman and her son and daughter at Lyme.” The auction took place at Bullocks in London on May 15, raising £400, which in today’s money would be around £33,000. Though it's unclear how much actually went to the Annings, the event helped stabilize their finances and brought them recognition from collectors in Paris and Vienna.
-
Read this chapter
Mary Anning made her living selling fossils, focusing mainly on invertebrate finds like ammonite and belemnite shells that were abundant in the area and fetched just a few shillings each. Vertebrate fossils, particularly ichthyosaur skeletons, brought higher prices but were extremely rare and required dangerous winter expeditions to collect. In 1823, a piece published in The Bristol Mirror wrote about her.
This persevering female has for years gone daily in search of fossil remains of importance at every tide, for many miles under the hanging cliffs at Lyme, whose fallen masses are her immediate object, as they alone contain these valuable relics of a former world, which must be snatched at the moment of their fall, at the continual risk of being crushed by the half suspended fragments they leave behind, or be left to be destroyed by the returning tide: – to her exertions we owe nearly all the fine specimens of Ichthyosauri of the great collections ...
Mary Anning's dangerous work was shown when, in October 1833, she narrowly escaped death after a landslide buried her black-and-white terrier, Tray, who was always with her while collecting fossils. She wrote to her friend Charlotte Murchison in November of that year, saying the loss of her old faithful dog had deeply upset her. The cliff had fallen on Tray instantly before her eyes, close to her feet. She added, "it was but a moment between me and the same fate."
As Anning made more significant discoveries, her name became known far beyond Lyme Regis. On December 10, 1823, she found the first complete Plesiosaurus, and in 1828 she discovered the first British pterosaur, later called a flying dragon when shown at the British Museum. The following year, 1829, brought her find of a Squaloraja fish skeleton. Though she had little formal schooling, Anning worked hard to learn science, copying papers by hand from books she borrowed. Palaeontologist Christopher McGowan noted that her copy of an 1824 paper by William Conybeare included detailed technical drawings so accurate they were hard to distinguish from the original. She also studied modern animals like fish and cuttlefish to better understand fossil anatomy. In 1824, Lady Harriet Silvester visited Lyme and wrote about Anning in her diary.
The extraordinary thing about this young woman is that she has made herself so thoroughly acquainted with the science that the moment she finds any bones she knows to what tribe they belong. She fixes the bones on a frame with cement and then makes drawings and has them engraved. It is certainly a wonderful instance of divine favour—that this poor, ignorant girl should be so blessed, for by reading and application she has arrived to that degree of knowledge as to be in the habit of writing and talking with professors and other clever men on the subject, and they all acknowledge that she understands more of the science than anyone else in this kingdom.
In 1826, at age twenty-seven, Mary Anning saved enough money to buy a house and open her own fossil shop, Anning's Fossil Depot, complete with a glass storefront window. The business was already well known, as local newspapers covered the move and noted she displayed a fine ichthyosaur skeleton. Geologists and collectors from across Europe and America came to Lyme Regis to visit her, including George William Featherstonhaugh, who called her a "very clever funny Creature" and bought fossils for the New York Lyceum of Natural History in 1827. In 1844, King Frederick Augustus II of Saxony visited her shop and purchased an ichthyosaur skeleton for his collection. His physician and aide, Carl Gustav Carus, wrote about the visit in his journal.
We had alighted from the carriage and were proceeding on foot, when we fell in with a shop in which the most remarkable petrifications and fossil remains—the head of an Ichthyosaurus—beautiful ammonites, etc. were exhibited in the window. We entered and found the small shop and adjoining chamber completely filled with fossil productions of the coast ... I found in the shop a large slab of blackish clay, in which a perfect Ichthyosaurus of at least six feet, was embedded. This specimen would have been a great acquisition for many of the cabinets of natural history on the Continent, and I consider the price demanded, £15 sterling, as very moderate.
Carus asked Anning to write her name and address in his pocketbook for future reference—she wrote it as "Mary Annins"—and when she handed it back to him she told him: "I am well known throughout the whole of Europe". As time passed, Anning's confidence in her knowledge grew, and in 1839 she wrote to the Magazine of Natural History to question the claim made in an article, that a recently discovered fossil of the prehistoric shark Hybodus represented a new genus, as an error since she had discovered the existence of fossil sharks with both straight and hooked teeth many years ago. The extract from the letter that the magazine printed was the only writing of Anning's published in the scientific literature during her lifetime. Some personal letters written by Anning, such as her correspondence with Frances Augusta Bell, were published while she was alive, however.
-
Read this chapter
Mary Anning faced enormous barriers because she was a woman in early 19th-century Britain. At that time, women couldn't vote, hold public office, or attend university. The Geological Society of London, which was just forming and growing in influence, refused to let women join or even attend meetings. For working-class women like Anning, the only jobs available were farm work, domestic service, or factory labor. These restrictions meant that despite her groundbreaking fossil discoveries, she remained excluded from the scientific community that was beginning to recognize her contributions.
Although Anning knew more about fossils and geology than many wealthy fossilists to whom she sold specimens, it was always gentlemen geologists who published scientific descriptions, often neglecting to mention her name, causing her resentment. Anna Pinney, a young woman who sometimes accompanied Anning while collecting, wrote: "She says the world has used her ill... these men of learning have sucked her brains, and made a great deal of publishing works, of which she furnished the contents, while she derived none of the advantages." Anning herself wrote in a letter: "The world has used me so unkindly, I fear it has made me suspicious of everyone." Hugh Torrens writes that these slights were part of a larger pattern of ignoring working-class contributions in early 19th-century scientific literature. Often a fossil would be found by a quarryman, construction worker, or road worker who would sell it to a wealthy collector, and it was the latter who was credited if the find was of scientific interest.
Mary Anning interacted with the scientific community in Lyme, where geologists came to collect fossils or talk about anatomy and classification. Henry De la Beche, who became one of Britain’s leading geologists, was a friend from teenage years, and they went fossil-hunting together. William Buckland, a geology lecturer at Oxford, often visited Lyme during Christmas vacations and was seen hunting with Anning. It was to him that she made a scientifically important suggestion in a letter sold for over £100,000 in 2020 — that bezoar stones were actually fossilized ichthyosaur or plesiosaur droppings. Buckland named these coprolites. In 1839, Buckland, Conybeare, and Richard Owen visited Lyme with Anning, who led them on a fossil-collecting trip.
Anning helped Thomas Hawkins collect ichthyosaur fossils at Lyme in the 1830s, but she noticed his habit of altering what he found. She wrote that he was "such an enthusiast that he makes things as he imagines they ought to be; and not as they are really found." A few years later, a public scandal erupted when it was revealed Hawkins had added fake bones to make some skeletons appear more complete. He sold these to the British Museum without telling the appraisers about the additions.
The Swiss palaeontologist Louis Agassiz visited Lyme Regis in 1834 and worked with Anning to obtain and study fish fossils found in the region. He was so impressed by Anning and her friend Elizabeth Philpot that he wrote in his journal: "Miss Philpot and Mary Anning have been able to show me with utter certainty which are the ichthyodorulite's dorsal fins of sharks that correspond to different types." He thanked both of them for their help in his book, Studies of Fossil Fish.
Another prominent geologist, Roderick Murchison, did some of his early fieldwork in southwest England, including Lyme, accompanied by his wife, Charlotte. He wrote that they decided Charlotte should stay behind in Lyme for a few weeks to "become a good practical fossilist, by working with the celebrated Mary Anning of that place." Charlotte and Anning became lifelong friends and correspondents. Through her work with her husband, Charlotte helped Anning build her network of customers throughout Europe and stayed with the Murchisons when Anning visited London in 1829. Anning's correspondents included Charles Lyell, who asked her opinion on how the sea was affecting the coastal cliffs around Lyme, as well as Adam Sedgwick—among her earliest customers—who taught geology at the University of Cambridge and counted Charles Darwin among his students. Gideon Mantell, who discovered the dinosaur Iguanodon, also visited Anning at her shop.
-
Read this chapter
By 1830, Mary Anning faced financial struggles again due to tough economic times in Britain that cut down on fossil demand and long gaps between big discoveries. Her friend, geologist Henry De la Beche, helped by commissioning artist Georg Scharf to create a lithographic print based on De la Beche’s watercolour painting Duria Antiquior, which showed prehistoric Dorset life inspired largely by Anning’s fossils. De la Beche sold copies to fellow geologists and wealthy contacts, giving all the money to Anning. This image became the first such scene from what would later be called deep time to spread widely. In December 1830, Anning made another major discovery—a new plesiosaur skeleton—that she sold for £200.
Around this time, Mary Anning switched from her family's long-time Congregational church to the Anglican one. The change came partly because attendance at the Congregational church dropped after 1828, when their popular pastor John Gleed left for the United States to campaign against slavery. He was replaced by Ebenezer Smith, who wasn't as well-liked. Also, the established Anglican church offered more social respectability, especially since some of Anning’s gentleman geologist customers—like Buckland, Conybeare, and Sedgwick—were ordained clergy there. Despite the shift, Anning remained devoutly religious and continued to actively support her new church, just as she had her old one.
In 1835, Mary Anning faced another major financial loss when she lost about £300 of her life savings in a bad investment. The exact details are unclear—some say she was swindled by a conman who disappeared with the money, while others believe the man died suddenly, leaving her unable to recover her funds. Her old friend William Buckland, concerned about her situation, helped arrange for the British Association for the Advancement of Science and the British government to award her a civil list pension. This £25 annual payment gave her some financial security.
-
Read this chapter
Mary Anning died from breast cancer on March 9, 1847, at age 47. Her fossil work had slowed in the final years of her life due to illness, and some townspeople wrongly thought she was drinking too much because of the laudanum she took for pain. In 1846, after learning of her diagnosis, the Geological Society raised money to help with her expenses. The Dorset County Museum made her an honorary member. She was buried on March 15 in St Michael’s churchyard. A stained-glass window in her memory was unveiled in 1850, funded by the vicar and members of the Geological Society of London. It shows the six corporal acts of mercy and bears an inscription honoring her contributions to geology and her kindness and integrity.
After Anning's death, Henry De la Beche, president of the Geological Society, wrote a eulogy that he read to a meeting of the society and published in its quarterly transactions, the first such eulogy given for a woman. These were honours normally only accorded to fellows of the society, which did not admit women until 1904. The eulogy began:
I cannot close this notice of our losses by death without adverting to that of one, who though not placed among even the easier classes of society, but one who had to earn her daily bread by her labour, yet contributed by her talents and untiring researches in no small degree to our knowledge of the great Enalio-Saurians, and other forms of organic life entombed in the vicinity of Lyme Regis...
In February 1865, an article about Mary Anning appeared in Charles Dickens’s literary magazine All the Year Round. The profile, titled “Mary Anning, The Fossil Finder,” was long thought to be by Dickens himself but was later identified by historians as written by Henry Stuart Fagan. Fagan’s work was deemed unoriginal and unreliable, introducing errors that still affect how Anning is understood today. He largely copied his piece from an earlier account by Dorset native Henry Rowland Brown, found in the second edition of Brown’s 1859 guidebook, The Beauties of Lyme Regis. The article highlighted the challenges Anning faced, especially the doubt of her neighbors. Fagan concluded by saying, “The carpenter's daughter has won a name for herself, and has deserved to win it.”
-
Read this chapter
Mary Anning's first famous discovery came soon after her father died, when she was just about twelve years old. In 1811, some sources say 1810 or even 1809, her brother Joseph found a four-foot skull but couldn't find the rest of the creature. After Joseph told Anning to search between the cliffs at Lyme Regis and Charmouth, she discovered the complete skeleton a few months later—seventeen feet long in total. The family hired workers to excavate it in November of that year, an event reported by local newspapers on November 9th, which identified the fossil as a crocodile.
The fossil found by the Annings was the first ichthyosaur to catch scientific attention in London, bought by a local lord and displayed by William Bullock, sparking public fascination. At a time when most believed Earth was only thousands of years old and species didn't evolve or go extinct, it challenged those views. Sir Everard Home wrote six papers for the Royal Society starting in 1814, though he never credited Anning and even wrongly gave museum staff the praise for preparing the fossil. He changed his mind several times about what the creature was, first thinking it was a fish, then comparing it to the platypus, and later suggesting it was an intermediate form between salamanders and lizards—calling it Proteo-Saurus. But Charles Konig of the British Museum had already named it Ichthyosaurus, and that stuck. He bought the skeleton in 1819. The skull remains at the Natural History Museum, but the rest of the skeleton has gone missing.
Between 1815 and 1819, Anning discovered several more ichthyosaur fossils, including nearly complete skeletons of different sizes. In 1821, William Conybeare and Henry De la Beche from the Geological Society of London published a detailed study of Anning’s finds and other specimens, determining that ichthyosaurs were a previously unknown kind of marine reptile. Based on differences in tooth structure, they identified at least three species. That same year, Anning found a 20-foot skeleton later named Ichthyosaurus platydon, now known as Temnodontosaurus platyodon. In the 1980s, it was confirmed that the first ichthyosaur found by Joseph and Mary Anning was also a member of this species.
In 2022, two plaster casts of the first complete ichthyosaur skeleton fossil discovered by Mary Anning were found in separate collections. One is at the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale University in the US, and the other is at the Natural History Museum in Berlin, Germany. These casts may be secondary, made from a direct cast of the original fossil, but they're in good condition and deemed historically important. They were likely taken from the specimen that Anning put up for auction in 1820.
-
Read this chapter
In 1821, William Conybeare co-authored a paper with Henry De la Beche about ichthyosaur anatomy, in which he named and described the genus Plesiosaurus, meaning "near lizard," because he thought it resembled modern reptiles more than the ichthyosaur did. The description was based on several fossils, including specimen OUMNH J.50146—a paddle and vertebral column obtained by Lieutenant-Colonel Thomas James Birch. Christopher McGowan has suggested this specimen may have originally been more complete and was collected by Mary Anning during the winter of 1820/1821. If true, it would have been Anning’s next major discovery, offering crucial information about this new type of marine reptile. No records of the find by Anning are known. The paper credited Birch for providing access to the specimen but did not mention who discovered or prepared it.
In 1823, Mary Anning found a second, much more complete plesiosaur skeleton, now known as specimen NHMUK OR 22656, formerly BMNH 22656. When William Conybeare presented his study of plesiosaur anatomy to the Geological Society in 1824, he didn't mention Anning's name, even though she may have collected both skeletons and provided the sketch of the second one he used in his talk. That same meeting also featured William Buckland describing the dinosaur Megalosaurus, and the combination of discoveries made a big splash in scientific circles.
Conybeare's presentation came after a heated controversy over whether one of the fossils was real. The plesiosaur's long neck had 35 vertebrae, which made the famous French anatomist Georges Cuvier suspicious when he looked at Anning's drawings of the second skeleton. He wrote to Conybeare, suggesting the fossil might be fake — made by combining bones from different animals. Fraud was common among early 19th-century fossil collectors, and if the issue hadn't been settled quickly, it could have ruined Anning’s reputation with other geologists. A special meeting of the Geological Society had been held in 1824, where they debated the skeleton's authenticity before deciding it was real. Cuvier later admitted he had acted too fast and was wrong.
In 1830, Mary Anning found another significant nearly complete plesiosaur skeleton. It was named Plesiosaurus macrocephalus by William Buckland and described in a paper by Richard Owen in 1840. Once again, Owen noted the wealthy gentleman who had bought the fossil and made it accessible for study, but he did not mention the woman who actually discovered and prepared it.
-
Read this chapter
Mary Anning found an exceptional ray-finned fish called Dapedium politum, which was described in 1828. In December of that year, she discovered a partial pterosaur skeleton, later identified by William Buckland in 1829 as Pterodactylus macronyx, though it was later renamed Dimorphodon macronyx by Richard Owen. Buckland credited Anning in his paper, and the find created a public sensation when displayed at the British Museum. It was the first pterosaur skeleton found outside Germany. Recent research suggests these creatures didn’t fly continuously while hunting fish.
In December 1829, Mary Anning discovered a fossil fish called Squaloraja. This find drew attention because the creature showed features that fell between sharks and rays. The specimen was significant in showing how ancient sea life might have evolved or related to modern species. It demonstrated that the creatures living long ago weren't simply like today's animals, but could represent transitional forms in nature's history. Her discovery helped scientists understand more about prehistoric marine life and its connections to current ocean inhabitants.
-
Read this chapter
Mary Anning made major contributions to early palaeontology beyond her famous vertebrate finds, especially marine reptiles. In 1826, she discovered a belemnite fossil with what looked like a chamber of dried ink, which her friend Elizabeth Philpot revived and used to illustrate ichthyosaur fossils. Artists soon followed, as more such fossils were found. Anning noticed the chambers resembled modern squid and cuttlefish ink sacs, leading William Buckland to conclude Jurassic belemnites used ink for defense. She also observed that "bezoar stones" found in ichthyosaur stomachs often contained fossilized fish parts and even small ichthyosaur bones. In 1824, she suggested these were fossilized feces, which Buckland confirmed in 1829 and named coprolites. When presenting this work to the Geological Society, Buckland credited Anning by name, praising her skill and industry.
-
Read this chapter
Mary Anning’s fossil discoveries helped prove that species could go extinct, challenging beliefs that God’s creation was perfect and that all animals lived somewhere on Earth today. Her finds, like the plesiosaur, were so strange they struck down the idea that odd fossils must be of living creatures hiding in unexplored places. Along with other scientists, Anning showed that past eras had creatures unlike any alive now, supporting Georges Cuvier’s theory of an “age of reptiles.” This work helped create a new field called palaeontology, using fossils to understand Earth's history. Gideon Mantell’s 1831 paper "The Age of Reptiles" popularized the idea, while Henry De la Beche’s painting Duria Antiquior helped people imagine ancient life. Anning and William Buckland also studied coprolites, fossilized dung, to learn about ancient ecosystems.
Throughout the 20th century, writers began seeing Mary Anning’s life as inspirational, starting with H. A. Forde’s 1925 book about her. P. J. McCartney claimed she inspired lyrics to a 1908 song, which he said became the tongue twister “She Sells Seashells.” But Stephen Winick from the American Folklife Center found no evidence linking Anning to the song. He checked McCartney’s original text and discovered McCartney gave no sources, only saying Anning was “reputed to be” the subject. The tongue twister appeared decades before the song, and the details don’t match Anning’s life at all. In fact, the song features no real female character resembling her, so if it was meant as a tribute, it’s a pretty ineffective one.
Much of what was written about Anning was aimed at children and focused on her early life, often romanticizing her story without always being historically accurate. She was referenced in historical novels, including The French Lieutenant’s Woman by John Fowles, who noted that no British scientist had named a species after her in her lifetime. In 1999, on the 200th anniversary of her birth, an international meeting was held in Lyme Regis bringing together historians, palaeontologists, and fossil collectors. In 2005, the Natural History Museum added Anning as one of its “gallery characters,” alongside scientists like Carl Linnaeus and William Smith. In 2007, American playwright Claudia Stevens premiered Blue Lias, or the Fish Lizard’s Whore, a solo play depicting Anning in later life, performed at several museums during the Charles Darwin bicentennial.
In 2009, Tracy Chevalier published a historical novel called Remarkable Creatures featuring Mary Anning and Elizabeth Philpot as main characters. A year later, Joan Thomas released another novel about Anning titled Curiosity in March 2010. Then in 2010, exactly 163 years after Anning's death, the Royal Society recognized her by including her in a list of ten British women who most influenced the history of science.
In 1902, the Lyme Regis Museum was built on the site of her former home, commissioned by Thomas Philpot, a relative of the Philpot sisters. The area where she collected fossils is now part of the Jurassic Coast World Heritage Site. In 2021, the Royal Mint issued sets of commemorative fifty pence coins called The Mary Anning Collection, designed by the palaeoartist Bob Nicholls and minted in acknowledgement of her lack of recognition as "one of Britain's greatest fossil hunters." The coins feature images of Temnodontosaurus, Plesiosaurus and Dimorphodon, which she discovered, and her discoveries were "often overlooked at a time when the scientific world was dom".
-
Read this chapter
In August 2018, an 11-year-old schoolgirl from Lyme Regis named Evie Swire started a campaign called “Mary Anning Rocks” to honor the fossil collector in her hometown. Supported by her mother Anya Pearson, the effort aimed to build a statue and create a learning legacy in Anning’s name. A crowdfunding campaign began but paused because of the pandemic; it restarted in November 2020. By January 2021, sculptor Denise Dutton had been chosen to make the statue. Planning permission was granted by Dorset Council for a spot overlooking Black Ven, where Anning made many of her discoveries. Professor Alice Roberts and Swire unveiled the statue on 21 May 2022, which marked the 223rd anniversary of Anning’s birth.
Read
Free to download, keep and share. For general information only — not professional medical, legal or financial advice. Please consult a qualified professional.