---
title: "Mary Anning"
chunk: 5/9
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"
---

By 1830, because of difficult economic conditions in Britain that reduced the demand for fossils, coupled with long gaps between major finds, Anning was having financial problems again. Her friend, the geologist Henry De la Beche, assisted her by commissioning Georg Scharf to make a lithographic print based on De la Beche's watercolour painting, Duria Antiquior, portraying life in prehistoric Dorset that was based largely on fossils Anning had found. De la Beche sold copies of the print to his fellow geologists and other wealthy friends and donated the proceeds to Anning. It became the first such scene from what later became known as deep time to be widely circulated. In December 1830, Anning finally made another major find, a skeleton of a new type of plesiosaur, which sold for £200.
It was around this time that Anning switched from attending the local Congregational church, where she had been baptised and in which she and her family had always been active members, to the Anglican church. The change was prompted in part by a decline in Congregational attendance that began in 1828 when its popular pastor, John Gleed, a fellow fossil collector, left for the United States to campaign against slavery. He was replaced by the less likeable Ebenezer Smith. The greater social respectability of the established church, in which some of Anning's gentleman geologist customers such as Buckland, Conybeare and Sedgwick were ordained clergy, was also a factor. Anning, who was devoutly religious, actively supported her new church as she had her old.
Anning suffered another serious financial setback in 1835 when she lost most of her life savings, about £300, in a bad investment. Sources differ somewhat on what exactly went wrong. Deborah Cadbury says that she invested with a conman who swindled her and disappeared with the money, but Shelley Emling writes that it is not clear whether the man ran off with the money or whether he died suddenly leaving Anning with no way to recover the investment. Concerned about Anning's financial situation, her old friend William Buckland persuaded the British Association for the Advancement of Science and the British government to award her an annuity, known as a civil list pension, in return for her many contributions to the science of geology. The £25 annual pension gave Anning some financial security.

=== Illness and death ===

Anning died from breast cancer at the age of 47 on 9  March 1847. Her fossil work had tailed off during the last few years of her life because of her illness, and as some townspeople misinterpreted the effects of the increasing doses of laudanum she was taking for the pain, there had been gossip in Lyme that she had a drinking problem. The regard in which Anning was held by the geological community was shown in 1846 when, upon learning of her cancer diagnosis, the Geological Society raised money from its members to help with her expenses and the council of the newly created Dorset County Museum made Anning an honorary member. She was buried on   15 March   in the churchyard of St Michael's, the local parish church. Members of the Geological Society contributed to a stained-glass window in Anning's memory, unveiled in 1850. It depicts the six corporal acts of mercy—feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, clothing the naked, sheltering the homeless, visiting prisoners and the sick, and the inscription reads: "This window is sacred to the memory of Mary Anning of this parish, who died 9 March AD 1847 and is erected by the vicar and some members of the Geological Society of London in commemoration of her usefulness in furthering the science of geology, as also of her benevolence of heart and integrity of life."

After Anning's death, Henry De la Beche, president of the Geological Society, wrote a eulogy that he read to a meeting of the society and published in its quarterly transactions, the first such eulogy given for a woman. These were honours normally only accorded to fellows of the society, which did not admit women until 1904. The eulogy began:

I cannot close this notice of our losses by death without adverting to that of one, who though not placed among even the easier classes of society, but one who had to earn her daily bread by her labour, yet contributed by her talents and untiring researches in no small degree to our knowledge of the great Enalio-Saurians, and other forms of organic life entombed in the vicinity of Lyme Regis ...
An anonymous article about Anning's life was published in February 1865 in Charles Dickens's literary magazine All the Year Round. The profile, "Mary Anning, The Fossil Finder", was long attributed to Dickens himself but, in 2014, historians of palaeontology Michael A. Taylor and Hugh Torrens identified Henry Stuart Fagan as the author, noting that Fagan's work was "neither original nor reliable" and "introduced errors into the Anning literature which are still problematic". Specifically, they noted that Fagan had largely and inaccurately plagiarised his article from an earlier account of Anning's life and work by Dorset native Henry Rowland Brown, from the second edition of Brown's 1859 guidebook, The Beauties of Lyme Regis. The article emphasised the difficulties Anning had overcome, especially the scepticism of her fellow townspeople. Fagan ended the article with: "The carpenter's daughter has won a name for herself, and has deserved to win it."

== Major discoveries ==

=== Ichthyosaurs ===