The Fossil Hunter: Dinosaurs, Evolution, and the Woman Whose Discoveries Changed The World

  • Shelley Emling
Palgrave Macmillan: 2009. 256 pp. $27, £15.99 9780230611566 | ISBN: 978-0-2306-1156-6

Remarkable Creatures

  • Tracy Chevalier
Dutton/HarperCollins: 2009. 352 pp. $26.95, £15.99 0525951458 9780007178377 | ISBN: 0-525-95145-8
Credit: ILLUSTRATION BY JONATHAN BURTON.

Until recently, histories of science were written almost entirely by, for and about men. The nineteenth-century hunt for Jurassic-era fossils along the beaches of the British town of Lyme Regis was no different. Although the names of naturalists such as Georges Cuvier, William Buckland and Richard Owen who used the fossils to overturn society's ideas about life on Earth are familiar, that of Mary Anning is only beginning to be exhumed. The publication of two books about her life — one factual, one fictional — will raise her profile in the public imagination.

Anning was a poor, working-class twelve-year-old when she made her first major discovery within the rocks of the perilous sea cliffs in 1811: the first complete skeleton of an ichthyosaur. She went on to uncover many other important fossils, such as the first plesiosaur and the first complete skeleton of the winged reptile Dimorphodon macronyx. Collecting and selling small fossils to earn a living, she also led fossil hunts for naturalists visiting Lyme Regis.

Anning's discoveries made it into the local newspapers. But it was the wealthy collectors and the established naturalists championing her finds in the halls of the Geological Society whose names became associated with them. Although her fossils helped overturn the popular idea that Earth and all its inhabitants were created in six days in 4004 BC, paving the way for Charles Darwin's great synthesis in 1859, Anning wasn't mentioned in key publications or lectures.

In her diligent biography The Fossil Hunter, Shelley Emling explains that in Anning's day women had no place in the cut and thrust of science. Urged not to appear outdoors without a chaperone, women were barred from places where learned debates took place and were thought to lack the intellectual rigour or stamina for fieldwork. Despite this, women did make vital contributions. Anning shared the beaches of Lyme Regis with three other female fossil collectors — the middle-class Philpott sisters, notably Elizabeth, who made well-regarded finds. And Emling describes the activity of two other talented nineteenth-century women, the wives of geologists William Buckland and Roderick Murchison, whose contributions included sketching and labelling of geological samples on expeditions.

But Anning was more than a collector or helper — she was a true scientist. She reconstructed and cleaned her own finds. She devoured scientific articles, often painstakingly copying out the entire text and figures. She engaged in spirited discussions with the men who sought her expertise and her samples. She dissected living sea creatures on the kitchen table to better understand the anatomy of their long-dead counterparts. She even conducted research, surmising, for example, that the rock-like bodies she often found within the skeletons she uncovered — coprolites — were hardened faeces. Together with William Buckland, she reconstituted coprolites in her workshop and deduced what the animals had been eating.

Like many retrospective narratives, Anning's story has its heroes and anti-heroes, set-pieces and eureka moments. In Remarkable Creatures, Tracy Chevalier uses these devices to construct a fictionalized account of Anning's life. Able to make things up when the details are shrouded in obscurity, Chevalier's engaging version easily wins out over Emling's more faithful biography. Chevalier's unconstrained hand lets one suspend disbelief, such as in “[Buckland] asked so many questions ... that I began to feel like a pebble rolled back and forth in the tide”. By contrast, confined by the facts, Emling's wearing reliance on the conditional perfect — in sentences such as “The bracing early-morning air would have invigorated Mary's senses” — soon begins to grate.

Emling's biography is the more thorough and complete work. It also frees us from the claustrophobic atmosphere of Lyme Regis, providing the context of discoveries happening elsewhere. Chevalier's tale glosses over most of Anning's later life. But so accurate was her fictional rendering that I felt I was reading the same book twice. Both works did, however, lack a gripping plot. Emling's solution was to incorporate peripheral dramas, such as natural disasters befalling Lyme Regis. Chevalier's strategy was to sneak Elizabeth Philpott into a key session of the Geographical Society and to give Anning a putative lover.

In the end, Anning's life story can offer no more than a pleasant but sedate read, either in fact or fiction. More evocative was the drama, brought out well in both works, of how her discoveries shook the world: leering, nightmarish monsters materializing from the clay and hinting at a world far more ancient, savage and uncaring than anyone could possibly have imagined.