We are down at the coast today... Lyme Regis... put on the map by an uneducated lass... with plenty of time on her hands... who set about helping her father... supplementing his carpenter's income by collecting unusual shells found on the beach... and selling them to the tourists. Her father died when she was eleven years old. Her mother paid her little attention... provided she did her chores... she could bring home her favourite stones... and store them in the back shed.
Her father taught her that if you struck stones of a certain type, they contained strange designs inside... if you were very careful... you could chip away the outer layer to reveal strange shapes... different to the seashells she found on the beach... and much bigger.
This was in 1815... and the church at that time was still keen to enforce the belief that the age of the earth could be calculated from the bible... adding up the "begattings" listed in the old testament multiply by the first number you thought of... and voilà... the age of the earth was 4,000 years old. The church also had a concern that no animal could become extinct... because God did everything for a purpose... so why would he go to the trouble of creating a creature... only to make it extinct... it didn't make sense. For this reason, this young girl was innocently providing dynamite that would explode the religious beliefs of her time.
Part of the holiday crowd to Lyme Regis included academics... some of whom got to see this girl's collection... and wondered if they were the fossilised remains of ancient sea creatures... heretical thoughts for that time. They asked the young girl to give them some of her best shells... and she willingly agreed. She listened to the academics talk about the shells and remembered every word. When the next holiday season came around and new academics asked to see inside her shed... she happily agreed. New academics wanted specimens the same as they had been shown by friends... and offered her payment to show them where the shells could be found. She showed the the bottom of the cliffs where the fossils could be found... but the academics could not identify the rocks hiding the ammonites... so academics paid the young girl to supply them with specified ammonites.
One day, walking at the bottom of the step black cliffs, she saw a larger rock that turned out to be the first fossilised dinosaur bone to be collected. She dragged the rock back to her shed to show the next visiting academic... who told her it was of no value... so she used it as a seat beside the fire in the shed.
She found a friend in the village willing to spend time to teach her to read and write... she started making notes about the rocks (fossils) that she found. Being young and innocent, she was tricked more often than she was paid for her fossils... but managed to gain enough income to feed her mother, brother and herself.
She started looking for fossils in new areas... a little away from the coast... at the base of another cliff face. After heavy storms, landslides would expose new rocks... and she collected valuable fossils from the Jurassic period. She wrote papers describing her finds and giving her suggestions regarding relationships between different finds... which were likely to be older... whether they belonged to the same species. She was frequently referenced by other academics in their papers... but this girl was not allowed to attend... certainly not allowed to address... the scientific meetings that had became very popular at that time.
The church was most hostile to the interpretations being placed on fossil finds... in her home town, some people were aggressive and threatening to the young girl. She lived a difficult life... but made a significant contribution to geological history.
The story has a happy ending (sort of). The young girl was Mary Anning. In your youth, you learned the tongue twister:
"She sells seashells by the sea shore,
and those shells that she sells are seashells I'm sure. "
You are saying those words in memory of the work of Mary Anning. After her death in 1847, her unusual life story attracted increasing interest. Charles Dickens wrote of her in 1865 that "the carpenter's daughter has won a name for herself, and has deserved to win it."
In 2010, one hundred and sixty-three years after her death, the Royal Society included Anning in a list of the ten British women who have most influenced the history of science.
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