Tracy Chevalier's Remarkable Creatures

Who remembers as a child chanting the tongue twister "She sells seashells on the seashore" until you
and your friends collapsed into giggling nonsense? The phrase was part of a children's poem written about Mary Anning (1799 -1847). Currently I am reading Tracy Chevalier's "Remarkable Creatures," a novel based on the lives of Anning and her friend Elizabeth Philpott and their passion for fossil collecting along the beaches of Dorsett, England.

Mary Anning was the daughter of a carpenter in Lyme Regis, a seaside town in southwest England. Mary and other family members gained additional income by gathering recently exposed fossils on the beach and selling them to visitors at the popular seaside resort. Mary herself was the first to find and reassemble an entire skeleton of--what was later to be called--an ichthyosaur. (Her first ichthyosaur skeleton ended up in a curiosities exhibition dressed in monocle and waistcoat.) People of the time usually called these types of odd fossils "crocodiles" of which no living examples had yet been observed in the wild. The theory of extinction of species had not been formulated, let alone accepted. In the popular belief of the time to claim that a species went extinct was to claim that God did not create perfect animals. She also discovered that the strange, conical shaped "bezoar stones" commonly found on the beach were fossilized ichthyosaur and plesiosaur feces.

Mary went on to make a number of findings and observations to the burgeoning science of paleontology. Because of her class and sex, she was shut out of any scientific discussion of her finds so she did not often receive credit. However the British Society for the Advancement of Science did award her a civil list pension of 25 pounds per year for her contributions to geology. In 2010, the Royal Society named her as one of the top ten most influential women in the history of British science. Her friend Miss Philpott also made more minor, but important, discoveries.

And this is why I love reading novels like "Remarkable Creatures" that exhume from the buried facts of history little known women who made major contributions to the arts and sciences. The painting, by an unspecified artist, depicts Mary Anning and her dog Tray before the Golden Cap in Dorset, which exposes a 185 million year continual stratum of Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous rock. Her dog Tray was killed by a landslide when the two were collecting fossils in this area. Mary herself was buried in another slide but survived. She also survived being hit by lightning as a child.

As Tracy Chevalier starts her novel, "I feel an echo of the lightning each time I find a fossil, a little jolt that says, 'Yes, Mary Anning, you are different from all the rocks on the beach.' That is why I am a hunter: to feel that bolt of lightning, and that difference, every day."

Citations: Remarkable Creatures and Wikipedia
Painting: Wikipedia