Mary Anning

Mary Anning
Born	May 21, 1799(1799-05-21) Lyme Regis, England
Died	March 9, 1847 (aged 47) Lyme Regis, England
Occupation	Fossil collector and paleontologist
Religious beliefs	Congregational church later coverted to Anglican
Parents	Richard and Mary Anning

Mary Anning (May 21, 1799 – March 9, 1847) was an early British fossil collector and paleontologist. Her skill in locating and preparing fossils, as well as the richness of the Jurassic era marine fossil beds at Lyme Regis, resulted in her making a number of important finds. These included the skeleton of the first ichthyosaur skeleton to be recognized as such and the first two plesiosaur skeletons ever found, the first pterosaur skeleton found outside of Germany, and some important fossil fish. Her observations also played a key role in the discoveries that belemnite fossils contained fossilized ink sacs, and that coprolites, known as bezoar stones at the time, were fossilized feces. The geologist Henry De la Beche painted Duria Antiquior, the first scene out of deep time to be widely circulated, based largely on fossils she had found, and sold prints for her benefit. Her work played a key role in the fundamental and far reaching changes that occurred in the early 19th century in ideas about prehistoric life and the history of the earth.

Anning's gender and social class—her parents were poor and were religious dissenters (non-Anglican protestants)—prevented her from fully participating in the scientific community of early 19th century Britain, which was dominated by wealthy Anglican gentlemen. As a result of this, she did not always receive full credit for her contributions. Despite this she became well known in geological circles in Britain, Europe, and America, but she struggled financially for much of her life.

Biography

Childhood

She was born in the coastal southern English town of Lyme Regis in Dorset,^[1] Mary's father, Richard, was a cabinet maker who supplemented his income by mining the coastal cliff-side fossil beds near Lyme Regis, and selling his finds to tourists. Richard Anning moved to Lyme from Colyton in Devon. He married Mary Moore, known as Molly, on 8 August 1793 in Blandford. Returning to Lyme, the couple lived in a house built on the town’s bridge, and attended the local Congregational Church, where their children were baptized. As religious dissenters, the Annings faced legal and social discrimination. Soon after their marriage a daughter Mary was born. She was followed by a second daughter, Martha, who died almost at once, then by a son Joseph, in 1796. In 1798 a second son, Henry, died in infancy and the eldest child, Mary, was burned to death, possibly while trying to feed wood shavings into a fire. When another daughter was born the following May, she was given the name of her dead sister, Mary.^[2]

In 1800, when she was 15 months old, an extraordinary event occurred. Mary was being held by a neighbor, Elizabeth Haskings, who was standing with two friends under an elm tree watching an outdoor show, when lightning struck the tree. The three women were killed, but onlookers realised the infant was still alive and rushed her home. A local doctor called her survival miraculous, and for years afterword members of her community would attribute the child's curiosity, intelligence, and lively personality to the incident.^[2]

The Annings had at least four more children: Henry, 1801; Percival, 1803; Elizabeth, 1804; and Richard, 1809. All died within a couple of years of birth, leaving only two surviving children, Joseph and Mary, when their father Richard died in 1810 at age 44, probably of tuberculosis. The Anning family was left without support, and had to apply for parish relief. Mary and her brother Joseph, who had both accompanied their father at times while he searched the nearby cliffs for fossils to sell, began collecting fossils full-time in an effort to earn some income.^[2]

Fossils as a family business

Fossil collecting was in vogue in the late 18th and early 19th century, at first as a pastime akin to stamp collecting but gradually transforming into a science as the importance of fossils to geology and biology became understood. At the same time more and more wealthy and middle class tourists were visiting Lyme Regis, which was becoming popular as a seaside resort. As their father had before them, Mary and Joseph Anning setup a table of curiosities near where the coach stopped at a local inn in order to sell to tourists. As time passed, especially after Joseph made an important find of an ichthyosaur skull in 1811 and Mary found the associated skeleton in 1812, they forged relationships within the scientific community, whose passion for fossils grew to be a major source of income for the family.^[3]

In 1818 Mary came to the attention of Thomas Birch, a wealthy fossil collector, when she sold him another ichthyosaur skeleton. A year later, disturbed by the poverty of the Anning family, which was at the point of having to sell their furniture to make ends meet, Birch arranged for the sale of his own fossil collection, the proceeds of which (some £400) were given to the Annings. Besides providing much needed funds, the sale raised the profile of the Anning family in the geologic community. Put on a sure (if somewhat austere) financial footing for the first time in a decade, Mary carried on with her fossil collecting and selling even as her brother devoted more and more time to his new career as an upholsterer.^[3] Her primary stock in trade were invertebrate fossils such as ammonite and belemnite shells, which were common in the area and sold for a few shillings. Vertebrate fossils were much rarer and exceptional specimens like the icthyosaur skeleton could sell for several pounds.^[4] The source of all these fossils were the coastal cliffs which surround Lyme and which are part of a geological formation known as the Blue Lias. This formation consists of alternating layers of limestone and shale laid down as sediment on a shallow seabed early in what would come to be called the Jurassic period (about 210-195 million years ago), and the cliffs are one of the richest fossil locations in Britain.^[5] The cliffs could be dangerously unstable, especially in winter when rain sometimes caused landslides that often drew collectors like the Annings because they exposed new fossils. On one occasion Mary barely avoided being killed by a landslide that did kill her dog Tray who for years had accompanied her while she collected.^[4]

Fossil shop and growing expertise

As Mary Anning continued to make important finds her reputation grew. In 1826, at the age of 27, she managed to save enough money to purchase a home with a glass store front window for her shop which was called Anning's Fossil Depot. The business had become important enough that the move was covered in the local paper, which noted that the shop currently had a fine ichthyosaur skeleton on display. Many geologists and fossil collectors from Europe and even America visited Mary at Lyme to purchase specimens. These included the geologist George William Featherstonhaugh who purchased fossils for the newly opened New York Lyceum of Natural History in 1827.^[6] King Frederick Augustus II of Saxony visited her shop in 1844 and purchased an ichthyosaur skeleton for his extensive natural history collection. When the King's physician and aid, Carl Gustav Carus, asked Mary to write her name in his notebook she did so and beside her name she wrote "I am well known throughout the whole of Europe." Carus also recorded this description of her shop in his journal: "... a shop in which the most remarkable petrifications and fossil remains — the head of an icthyosaurus , beautiful ammonites, etc. were exhibited in the window. We entered and found a little shop and adjoining chamber completely filled with fossil productions of the coast."^[7]

Mary's education was extremely limited; she had learned to read at a sunday school run by the Congregational church, and her much of her childhood reading material consisted of Dissenter religious writings.^[8] However, in order to educate herself as much as possible about fossils Mary read as much of the scientific literature as she could get hold of. Often she laboriously hand copied papers she borrowed from others. One historian who had examined a copy she made of a 1824 paper by William Conybeare on marine reptile fossils noted that the copy included several pages of detailed technical illustrations that he was hard pressed to tell apart from the original. She also dissected modern animals including both fish and cuttlefish in order to better understand the anatomy of some of the fossils she worked with. Lady Harriet Silvester visited Lyme in 1824.^[4] She remarked in her diary:

... the extraordinary thing in 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.^[9]

As time passed, her confidence in her knowledge increased, and in 1839 she took the time to write the Magazine of Natural History to question their claim that a fossil that had recently been found of the prehistoric shark Hybodus represented a new genus as she had discovered many years ago the existence of fossil sharks with both straight and hooked teeth.^[10][11]

Interactions with the scientific community

Besides purchasing specimens many of the leading geologists of the time visited Mary to work with her collecting fossils and to discuss issues of anatomy and classification. Henry De la Beche, who would become one of Britain's leading geologists, collected fossils with Mary (and sometimes with her brother Joseph as well) when they were both still teenagers.^[12] William Buckland who lectured on geology at Oxford often visited Lyme on his Christmas vacations and frequently went collecting with Anning.^[13] In 1839 Buckland, Conybeare, and Richard Owen visited Lyme together so that Mary could lead them all on a fossil collecting excursion.^[14] She also sometimes assisted Thomas Hawkins with his efforts to collect icthyosaur fossils at Lyme in the 1830s. She was aware of his penchant to "enhance" the fossils he collected. She wrote: "...he is such an enthusiast that he makes things as he imagines they ought to be; and not as they are really found..."^[15]. A few years later a public scandal would ensue when it was discovered that Hawkins had inserted fake bones to make some fossil marine reptile skeletons seem more complete, and the fossils had later been purchased for a large sum by the government for the British Museum without the appraisers knowing about the additions.^[16] The Swiss paleontologist Louis Agassiz visited Lyme in 1834 and worked with Mary to obtain and study fish fossils found in the region. He was so impressed by the knowledge of 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 icthyodorulites dorsal fins of sharks that correspond to different types." He thanked both of them for their help in his monumental book, Studies of Fossil Fish.^[17]

Another leading British geologist, Roderick Murchison, did some of his first field work in southwest England, including Lyme. He was accompanied by his wife Charlotte who assisted his work. Murchison wrote that they decided that 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 Murchison and Mary would become life long friends and correspondents. Charlotte, who traveled widely and met many prominent geologists through her work with her husband, would help Mary build her network of customers throughout Europe, and Mary would stay with the Murchisons when she visited London in 1829. Mary's correspondents included Charles Lyell who wrote her to ask her opinion on how the sea was affecting the coastal cliffs around Lyme, and Adam Sedgwick who taught geology, Charles Darwin was one of his students, at Cambridge and who was one of Anning's earliest customers. Even Gideon Mantell visited her at her shop.^[18]

As a working class woman Mary would always be an outsider to the scientific community. At the time in Britain women were not allowed to vote (neither were working class men who were too poor to meet the property requirement), hold public office, or attend university, and the newly formed but increasingly influential Geological Society would not allow women to attend meetings as guests let alone become members.^[19] Also working against Anning was her working class background and her family's status as religious dissenters, which almost certainly subjected them to discrimination in a conservative town like Lyme Regis. In general the only occupations open to lower class women at the time were farm labour, domestic service, and increasingly work in the newly opening factories. Although Mary knew more about fossils and geology than many of the gentlemen fossilists she sold to, it was always such gentlemen who published the scientific descriptions of the specimens she found, often neglecting to mention her name. As time grew on she became somewhat resentful of this fact.^[4] Later in Mary's life a young woman who sometimes accompanied her while she collected 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."^[20]

Financial difficulties, religious conversion

The lithographic print, Duria Antiquior, made by Scharf based on De la Beche's original watercolour.

By 1830, because of difficult economic conditions in Britain that reduced the demand for fossils and the long gaps between major finds, she was having financial difficulties again. The geologist Henry De la Beche assisted her by having Georg Scharf make a lithographic print based on his watercolor painting Duria Antiquior of life in prehistoric Dorset, which was largely based on fossils Mary had found. De la Beche then sold copies of the prints to his fellow geologists and other wealthy friends and donated the proceeds to her. This became the first such scene from deep time to be widely circulated.^{[21] [22]} It also helped that in December of 1830 she finally made another major find, a skeleton of a new type of plesiosaur, that sold for £200.^[23] Also around this time Mary switched from attending the local Congregational church where she had been baptised and in which she and her family had always been active members to the Anglican church. The switch was prompted in part by a sharp decline in the number of people attending the local Congregational Chapel. The decline began when its popular pastor, who had been a fellow fossil collector and friend to Mary, left for the United States to campaign against slavery in 1828, and was replaced by a less likable individual. The greater social respectability of the established church, in which many of Mary's gentleman geologist customers like Buckland and Conybeare were ordained clergy, was also a factor. Mary, who was very religiously devout, actively supported her new church as she had her old.^[24]

Mary suffered another serious financial setback in 1835 when she lost most of her life savings, about £300, in a bad investment. Concerned about her financial situation her old friend William Buckland persuaded the British Association for the Advancement of Science and the British government to award her an annuity, known as a Civil list pension, in return for her many contributions to the science of geology. The £25 a year pension gave her a certain amount of security.^[25]

Gravestone of Mary and her brother Joseph

Illness and death

Mary Anning's Window, St Michael's Church

In March of 1847 Anning died of breast cancer; she was 47 years old. Her work had tailed off the last couple of years of her life, and due to some townspeople misinterpreting the affects of the increasing doses of laudanum she was taking for her painful illness there was gossip in Lyme that she was drinking.^[26] After her death a eulogy, written by her friend Henry De la Beche, was read by him at a meeting of the Geological Society of London of which he was now president. Such eulogies were an honor normally only accorded to fellows of the society, and Mary's was the first ever given for a woman; the society would not admit women as fellows until 1904. Some members of the society subsequently contributed to a stained-glass window to her memory, in the parish church of St Michael the Archangel in Lyme Regis. The inscription for the window reads: "This window is sacred to the memory of Mary Anning of this parish, who died 9 March AD 1847 and is erected by the vicar and some members of the Geological Society of London in commemoration of her usefulness in furthering the science of geology, as also of her benevolence of heart and integrity of life." The window itself depicts the corporal works of mercy, i.e. feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, clothing the naked, sheltering the homeless, visiting prisoners and visiting the sick. Charles Dickens wrote an article about her life in his literary magazine All the Year Round that emphasised the difficulties she had overcome especially the scepticism of her fellow townspeople of Lyme.^[27][28] Dickens wrote: "the carpenter's daughter has won a name for herself and has deserved to win it."^[29]

Major discoveries

Ichthyosaurs

Mary Anning's first famous discovery was made shortly after her father's death when she was just twelve. In 1810 (some sources say 1811 or 1809) her bother Joseph found what he thought was a crocodile skull, but the rest of the animal was not in evidence.^[30][26] Although Joseph’s time was increasingly taken up by his apprenticeship to an upholsterer, Mary kept searching and a year later a storm weathered away part of the cliff and exposed part of the rest of the skeleton of the 17ft (5.2m) long creature, which she was able to dig out of the cliff and collect with a little help from local quarrymen.^[31] Other ichthyosaur remains had been discovered in years past at Lyme and elsewhere, but the specimen found by the Annings was the first to come to the attention of scientific circles in London. It was purchased for £27 in 1812 by the lord of a local manor who passed it on to William Bullock for public display in London.^[30] There it created a sensation, and raised questions in scientific and even religious circles about ancient life.^[31] This notoriety increased when Everard Home wrote a series of six papers, starting in 1814, describing it for the royal society.^[29][26] Home was perplexed by the creature, and kept changing his mind about its classification, first thinking it was a kind of fish, then thinking it might have some kind of affinity with the duckbilled platypus (only recently known to science) , and finally thinking it might be a kind of intermediate form between salamanders and lizards.^[32] Home’s papers never mentioned who had collected the fossil, and he mistakenly credited the painstaking cleaning and preparation of the fossil that Mary had performed to the staff at Bullock’s museum.^[31] Charles Konig, then an assistant curator of the British Museum, suggested the name ichthyosaurus (fish lizard) for the specimen and it stuck. Konig would purchase the skeleton for the Museum in 1819.^[32]

Mary found several other ichthyosaur fossils during the period 1815-1819, including almost complete skeletons ranging in size from as small as a trout to as large as a whale. In 1821 William Conybeare and Mary’s old friend Henry De la Beche, both members of the Geological Society of London, collaborated on a paper that analyzed in detail the specimens found by Mary and others. They concluded that ichthyosaurs were a previously unknown kind of marine reptile, and based on differences in tooth structure they concluded that there had been at least four species.^[33][32]

Plesiosaurs

Rhomaleosaurus cramptoni found by Anning

Cast of "Plesiosaurus" macrocephalus found by Mary Anning, Muséum national d'histoire naturelle, Paris

Skeleton of the "Plesiosaurus" macrocephalus given above

Her next major discovery was a skeleton of a plesiosaur in 1821, the first of its kind to be found. The fossil was subsequently described by William Conybeare as Plesiosaurus dolichodeirus and is the type specimen (holotype) of the species, which itself is the type species of the genus, and in 1823 discovered a second even more complete (the first one had been missing the skull) plesiosaur skeleton. When Conybeare presented his findings on plesiosaurs to a meeting of the Geological Society in 1824 he failed to mention Anning by name even though she had collected both the skeletons he described and he used her sketch of the second skeleton in the presentation.^[34] Conybeare's presentation followed the resolution of a controversy over the legitimacy of one of the fossils. The extremely long neck of the plesiosaur with its unprecedented 35 neck vertebrae had raised the suspicions of the eminent French anatomist Georges Cuvier when he reviewed Anning's drawings of the second skeleton, and he wrote to Conybeare suggesting the possibility the find was a fake produced by combining fossil bones from different kinds of animals. Fraud was far from unknown among early 19th century fossil collectors, and if the controversy had not been resolved promptly the accusation could have seriously damaged Anning's ability to sell fossils to other geologists. Cuvier's accusation had resulted in a special meeting of the Geological Society earlier in 1824, which after some debate had concluded the skeleton was legitimate. Cuvier later admitted he had acted in haste and had been mistaken.^[35]

Fossil fish and pterosaur

Anning found an 'unrivalled specimen' of Dapedium politum, a ray-finned fish, as described in 1828. She discovered an important fossil of a pterosaur, a Pterodactylus macronyx (later renamed by Richard Owen Dimorphodon macronyx), the first found outside Germany and thought to be the first complete skeleton.

Invertebrates and trace fossils

Those vertebrate fossil finds left Anning's mark in history, but she continued collecting for the remainder of her life and made numerous other contributions to early paleontology. In 1826 Anning discovered what appeared to be a chamber containing dried ink inside a belemnite fossil. She showed it to her friend Elizabeth Philpot who was able to revivify the ink and use it to illustrate some of her own icthyosaur fossils, and other local artists were soon doing the same as such ink chambers were found in more fossils. Mary noted how closely the fossilized ink chambers resembled the ink sacs of modern squid and cuttle fish, which she had dissected to better understand the anatomy of fossil cephalopods, and this quickly led her friend the geologist William Buckland to publish the conclusion that Jurassic belemnites had used ink for defense just as many modern cephalopods do.^[36] It was also Anning who noticed that the oddly shaped fossils then known as "bezoar stones" were sometimes found in the abdominal region of ichthyosaur skeletons. She also noted that if such stones were broken open they often contained fossilized fish bones and scales as well as sometimes bones from small ichthyosaurs. It was these observations by Anning that led William Buckland to propose in 1829 that the stones were fossilized feces and name them coprolites. In contrast with what had happened with the plesiosaur skeletons years earlier, when Buckland presented his findings on coprolites to the Geological Society he mentioned Anning by name and praised her skill and industry in helping resolve the mystery.^[37]

Impact and legacy

Taken all together, Mary Anning's discoveries became key pieces of evidence for extinction. Georges Cuvier had put forth his analysis of fossil mammals as evidence for the reality of extinction in the late 1790s. Despite this, in the early 1820s it was still believed by many that animals did not become extinct; any oddities found were explained away as still living somewhere in an unexplored region of the earth. The bizarre nature of the fossils found by Mary Anning, some like the Plesiosaurs so unlike any known living creature, struck a heavy blow against this argument.^[38] They also played a significant role in the development in the 1820s of a new discipline of geohistorical analysis within geology that sought to understand the history of the earth by using evidence from fossils to reconstruct extinct organisms and the environments they lived in; this eventually came to be called paleontology. In particular the Ichthyosaurs, Plesiosaurs, and pterosaur she found, along with the first dinosaur fossils which were found by Gideon Mantell and William Buckland during the same period, provided convincing evidence for another controversial idea of Cuvier's, which was that there had been an "age of reptiles" when reptiles rather than mammals had been the dominant form of animal life.^[39]

After her death, Mary dropped into obscurity but, in recent decades, she has been rediscovered. It is well known that Mary Anning is associated with the old tongue-twister, "She sells sea shells on the sea shore." ^[40] It was composed in 1908, more than a half century after her death, by Terry Sullivan who was inspired by her life story.^[41] The original text was:

She sells seashells on the seashore
The shells she sells are seashells, I'm sure
So if she sells seashells on the seashore
Then I'm sure she sells seashore shells.^[41]

In 2005, a Mary Anning 'facsimile' was created at the Natural History Museum as one of a number of notable gallery characters to patrol its displays. She is thus among other luminaries including Carl Linnaeus, Dorothea Bate, and William Smith.^[42]

Writer John Fowles in The French Lieutenant's Woman (Ch. 8) notes: "One of the meanest disgraces of British palaeontology is that though many scientists of the day gratefully used her finds to establish their own reputation, not one native type bears the name anningii". As one of her biographers noted, this contrasted with the fact that some of the prominent British geologists who had utilized her finds, like Buckland and Roderick Murchison, ended up with multiple fossil species named after them. However, in the 1840s the Swiss - American expert on fossil fish Louis Agassiz did name two fossil fish species, Acrodus anningiae, and Belenostomus anningiae, after her, and another after her friend Elizabeth Philpot. Agassiz was grateful for the help the two women had given him in examining and understanding fossil fish specimens, especially fossil sharks, during his 1834 visit to Lyme Regis. ^[17]

In 2009 Tracy Chevalier wrote a historical novel entitled Remarkable Creatures, which charts Anning's life and discoveries.

Notes

Bibliography

• Torrens, Hugh. 1995. "Mary Anning (1799-1847) of Lyme: 'the greatest fossilist the world ever knew'," British Journal for the History of Science, 25:257-284. JSTOR
• Anon. 1828. "Another discovery by Mary Anning of Lyme. An unrivalled specimen of Dapedium politum an antediluvian fish." Salisbury and Winchester Journal, 108:5599 2.

See also

• Jurassic Coast
• List of fossil sites (with link directory)
• History of paleontology

Further reading

• Goodhue, Thomas W (2005), "Mary Anning: the fossilist as exegete.", Endeavour 29 (1): 28–32, 2005 Mar, doi:10.1016/j.endeavour.2004.11.004, PMID 15749150 
• Norman (1999), "Mary Anning and her times: the discovery of British palaeontology (1820-1850).", Trends Ecol. Evol. (Amst.) 14 (11): 420–421, 1999 Nov, doi:10.1016/S0169-5347(99)01700-0, PMID 10511714 
• Laurence Anholt, Stone Girl Bone Girl: The Story of Mary Anning, ISBN 1-84507-700-8, Frances Lincoln Publishers 2006
• Jeannine Atkins, Mary Anning and the Sea Dragon, ISBN 0374348405 ISBN 978-0374348403 , Farrar Straus Giroux 1999
• Don Brown, Rare Treasure: Mary Anning and Her Remarkable Discoveries, ISBN 0-618-31081-9, Houghton Mifflin Co 2003
• Nigel J. Clarke, Mary Anning 1799-1847: A Brief History, ISBN 0-907683-57-6, Clarke (Nigel J) Publications 1998
• Sheila Cole, The Dragon in the Cliff: A Novel Based on the Life of Mary Anning, ISBN 0-595-35074-7, iUniverse.com 2005
• Marie Day, Dragon in the Rocks: A Story Based on the Childhood of the Early Paleontologist, Mary Anning, ISBN 1-895688-38-8, Maple Tree Press 1995
• Emling, Shelley; The Fossil Hunter, Palgrove Macmillan ,London 2009 ISBN 978-0230611566
• Dennis B. Fradin, Mary Anning: The Fossil Hunter (Remarkable Children), ISBN 0-382-39487-9, Silver Burdett Press 1997
• Thomas W. Goodhue, Curious Bones: Mary Anning and the Birth of Paleontology (Great Scientists), ISBN 1-883846-93-5
• Thomas W. Goodhue, Fossil Hunter: The Life and Times of Mary Anning (1799-1847), ISBN 1-930901-55-0, cademica Pr Llc 2004
• Patricia Pierce, Jurassic Mary: Mary Anning and the Primeval Monsters, ISBN 0-7509-4039-5, Sutton Publishing 2006
• Crispin Tickell, Mary Anning of Lyme Regis, ISBN 0-9527662-0-5, Lyme Regis Philpot Museum 1996
• Sally M. Walker, Mary Anning: Fossil Hunter (On My Own Biographies (Hardcover)), ISBN 1-57505-425-6, Carolrhoda Books 2000
• 2007 QCA KS1 Sats Level 3 Reading Paper "Stones and Bones" Section 3: Mary Anning

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Mary Anning

Wikisource has the text of the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica article Anning, Mary.

• Mary Anning, Finder of Fossils at the San Diego Supercomputer Center site on women scientists.
• Mary Anning at the Lyme Regis museum
• Article on Anning at the UC Berkely Museum of Paleontology
• Article on Anning at The Dorset Page
• Biography of Anning at the British Natural History Museum
• Article on Anning at strange science
• A 360 degree panorama of East Cliff at Lyme Regis, the site of Mary Anning's ichthyosaur find in 1811
• song “Mary Anning” by "Artichoke"