---
title: "Mary Anning"
chunk: 8/9
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Anning"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:05:48.037973+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

Anning's discoveries became key pieces of evidence for extinction. Georges Cuvier had argued for the reality of extinction in the late 1790s based on his analysis of fossils of mammals such as mammoths. Nevertheless, until the early 1820s it was still believed by many scientifically literate people that just as new species did not appear, so existing ones did not become extinct—in part because they felt that extinction would imply that God's creation had been imperfect; any oddities found were explained away as belonging to animals still living somewhere in an unexplored region of the Earth. The bizarre nature of the fossils found by Anning—some, such as the plesiosaur, so unlike any known living creature—struck a major blow against this idea.
The ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs, and pterosaur she found, along with the first dinosaur fossils, which were discovered by Gideon Mantell and William Buckland during the same period, showed that during previous eras the Earth was inhabited by creatures different from those living today, and provided important support for another controversial suggestion of Cuvier's: that there had been an "age of reptiles" in which they rather than mammals had been the dominant form of animal life. This phrase became popular after the publication in 1831 of Mantell's paper "The Age of Reptiles", which summarised the evidence that there had been an extended geological era in which giant reptiles had swarmed the land, air and sea. These discoveries also played a key role in the development of a new discipline of geohistorical analysis within geology in the 1820s that sought to understand the history of the Earth by using evidence from fossils to reconstruct extinct organisms and the environments in which they lived. This discipline eventually came to be called palaeontology. Illustrations of scenes from "deep time" (now known as palaeoart), such as Henry De la Beche's painting Duria Antiquior, helped convince people that it was possible to understand life in the distant past. De la Beche had been inspired to create the painting by a vivid description of the food chain of the Lias by William Buckland that was based on analysis of coprolites. The study of coprolites, pioneered by Anning and Buckland, would prove to be a valuable tool for understanding ancient ecosystems.

Throughout the 20th century, beginning with H. A. Forde and his The Heroine of Lyme Regis: The Story of Mary Anning the Celebrated Geologist (1925), a number of writers saw Anning's life as inspirational. According to P. J. McCartney in Henry De la Beche: Observations on an Observer (1978), she was the basis of Terry Sullivan's lyrics to the 1908 song  which, McCartney claimed, became the popular tongue twister, "She Sells Seashells":

However, Stephen Winick of the American Folklife Center has shown that no evidence has been presented for any causal connection between Anning and the lyrics (which are about a music-hall performer who has difficulty with tongue-twisters); in particular, Winick consulted McCartney's original text and discovered that not only did McCartney not provide any sources to support his statement, he merely said that Anning was "reputed to be" the subject of the song. Winick also pointed out that the tongue-twister pre-dated Sullivan by decades, and stated that there is a "very imperfect fit between the details of the song and those of Mary Anning's life", and "not even a real female character in the song, let alone anyone recognizable as Mary Anning", ultimately concluding that if the song was intended as a tribute to Anning, it is "a pretty ineffective one."
Much of the material written about Anning was aimed at children, and tended to focus on her childhood and early career. Much of it was also highly romanticised and not always historically accurate. Anning has been referenced in several historical novels, most notably in The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969) by John Fowles, who was critical of the fact that no British scientist had named a species after her in her lifetime.
In 1999, on the 200th anniversary of Anning's birth, an international meeting of historians, palaeontologists, fossil collectors and others interested in her life was held in Lyme Regis. In 2005 the Natural History Museum added Anning, alongside scientists such as Carl Linnaeus, Dorothea Bate and William Smith, as one of the "gallery characters" (actors dressed in period costumes) it uses to walk around its display cases. In 2007, American playwright/performer Claudia Stevens premiered Blue Lias, or the Fish Lizard's Whore, a solo play with music by Allen Shearer depicting Anning in later life. Among the presenters of its thirty performances around the Charles Darwin bicentennial were the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, museums of natural history at the University of Michigan and the University of Kansas, and the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History.