Mary Anning and Fossil Hunting

Discovery

BBC

Science, Technology

4.3 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 29 October 2018

⏱️ 27 minutes

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Summary

Mary Anning lived in Lyme Regis on what is now known as the Jurassic Coast in the first half of the 19th century. Knowing the shore from childhood and with a remarkable eye for detection she was extremely successful in finding fossils. In 1812 she unearthed parts of an Icthyosaur and in 1823 she discovered the first skeleton of what became known as a Plesiosaurus – a long-necked, flippered creature with a tiny head. It looked a bit like an elongated turtle with no shell. Naomi Alderman tells the science story of how Mary Anning, a poor and relatively uneducated young woman, became the supplier of the best fossils to the gentlemen geologists who were beginning to understand that the earth was very old and had been inhabited by strange extinct creatures. Naomi talks to Tracy Chevalier, author of Remarkable Creatures, a novel about Mary Anning, about her life and relationship with the geologists of the time, and to Dr Susannah Maidment, Curator of Dinosaurs at the Natural History Museum, about fossil hunting today. Image: Lyme Regis, from Charmouth, Dorset 1814-1825 by William Daniell (Credit: Historica Graphica Collection/Heritage Images/Getty Images)

Transcript

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0:37.0	So often the seed of a brilliant new scientific discovery is a matter of looking closely, examining
0:46.8	something everyone else just takes for granted. A matter of, for example, looking at a shore full of rocks, grey, beige, slate, dirty white,
0:59.9	and seeing that there's treasure inside, or having looked closely enough for long enough to see the shape of the past in a beach or a cliff, to trace with your eye a certain deepness in the stone, a change of colour or
1:16.7	texture that shows that bones of ancient monsters lie inside. But of course the ability to look closely isn't the same as being
1:28.0	recognized yourself. This is the story of Mary Anning, fossil hunter, dinosaur discoverer and excavator, a genius of looking, who was, for most of her life quite overlooked. Mary Annning was born in Lim Regis, Dorset in 1799. She had two pieces of luck.
2:00.0	The first was that the early 19th century was a time of considerable excitement about science,
2:06.0	with a feverish interest in new discoveries and inventions of all kinds.
2:10.0	The second was that Lyme Regis is on what's now called the Jurassic Coast, a place where
2:16.7	geological good fortune means that coastal erosion is constantly exposing new fossils in the rocks.
2:24.0	Well, we know that now.
	...

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