STONE TREASURES – MARY

ANNING AND THE TERROR LIZARDS

1823

THE SOFT AND FOSSIL-RICH LIMESTONE CLIFFS of Lyme Regis on the border of Devon and Dorset are forever crumbling – it is as if the earth’s crust has been turned inside out – and from an early age Mary Anning loved to walk with her dog among the debris, chipping out stone treasures with a little hammer and pickaxe that she carried, together with a basket. The Anning family eked out a living in the early years of the nineteenth century selling these ‘snake stones’ and ‘verteberries’ to visitors – they had a tiny tumbledown shop beside the beach. But Mary was much more than a beachcomber.

‘The extraordinary thing about this young woman,’ wrote one visitor in the 1820s, ‘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.’

The twin disciplines of geology (the study of the earth), and palaeontology (the study of ‘early things’) were just developing, and as the experts heard of Mary’s work they hurried down from their universities and learned societies to Lyme Regis. ‘By reading and application,’ wrote Lady Harriet Silvester, ‘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.’

If Mary Anning ever alighted on an especially large treasure, she would go for help, leaving her dog to guard the spot, and in December 1823 she needed a large digging party to unearth the fossilised bones of a nine-foot monster that seemed to be a cross between a turtle and a snake. Its spine alone comprised ninety ‘verteberries’, with fourteen ribs and three surviving fine-boned paddles instead of feet. Academics identified the discovery as the world’s first ever complete example of a ‘plesiosaur’ – a ‘near-lizard’.

Modern science sets the plesiosaurs in the Mesozoic era, living 245 to 65 million years ago in that distantly frightening period that most people today accept as ‘prehistoric’. But in 1823 many preachers taught their congregations that God had made the world less than six thousand years previously, even fixing on a precise date – 4004 BC. According to the Book of Genesis, the whole of Creation was accomplished in just six days. How could a loving God have filled the earth with these sinister creeping things?^* And how did the age of lizards fit in with the story of the Flood – or with Adam and Eve, for that matter? The Bible did not even mention the giant reptiles’ existence.

Mary was a devout chapel-goer, but these questions did not trouble her. The little bonneted figure could frequently be seen scouring the Dorset cliffs, making her discoveries – among them some of the earliest and finest examples of ichthyosaurs (fish lizards), and the first British ‘flying dragon’, the pterodactyl (so named from the Greek Pteron, wing, and Daktulos, finger). By the time of her death in 1847 Mary had become the heroine of England’s Jurassic coast, awarded annuities by Parliament, by the Geological Society and by the British Association for the Advancement of Science. But she would have traded them all for her name at the top of a learned article. As she remarked one day to a young woman with whom she went out fossilling, ‘these men of learning have made a great deal by publishing works of which I furnished the contents’. They had ‘sucked my brains,’ said Mary – and then quietly resumed her chipping.