The profile, "Mary Anning, The Fossil Finder," was long attributed to Dickens himself but, in 2014, historians of paleontology Michael A. An anonymous article about Anning's life was published in February 1865 in Charles Dickens' literary magazine All the Year Round. The only scientific writing of hers published in her lifetime appeared in the Magazine of Natural History in 1839, an extract from a letter that Anning had written to the magazine's editor questioning one of its claims.Īfter her death in 1847, Anning's unusual life story attracted increasing interest. Anning became well known in geological circles in Britain, Europe, and America, and was consulted on issues of anatomy as well as fossil collecting. However her friend, geologist Henry De la Beche, who painted Duria Antiquior, the first widely circulated pictorial representation of a scene from prehistoric life derived from fossil reconstructions, based it largely on fossils Anning had found, and sold prints of it for her benefit. As a woman, she was not eligible to join the Geological Society of London and she did not always receive full credit for her scientific contributions. Her observations played a key role in the discovery that coprolites, known as bezoar stones at the time, were fossilised faeces, and she also discovered that belemnite fossils contained fossilised ink sacs like those of modern cephalopods.Īnning struggled financially for much of her life. Her discoveries included the first correctly identified ichthyosaur skeleton when she was twelve years old the first two nearly complete plesiosaur skeletons the first pterosaur skeleton located outside Germany and fish fossils. Anning's findings contributed to changes in scientific thinking about prehistoric life and the history of the Earth.Īnning searched for fossils in the area's Blue Lias and Charmouth Mudstone cliffs, particularly during the winter months when landslides exposed new fossils that had to be collected quickly before they were lost to the sea. Mary Anning ( – 9 March 1847) was an English fossil collector, dealer, and palaeontologist who became known around the world for finds she made in Jurassic marine fossil beds in the cliffs along the English Channel at Lyme Regis in the county of Dorset in Southwest England.
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