Mary Anning

Mary Anning ( born May 21, 1799 in Lyme Regis, † March 9, 1847 ) was a British fossil collector. She was one of the first professional collectors of fossils and is thus considered one of the first Paläontologinnen.

Life

Born in the, situated on the southern English coastal village of Lyme Regis in Dorset, Mary Anning is said to be noticed at the age of 15 months as unusual: As in 1800, embarking on a flash right in the village, who met four women, was the only survivor, the young Mary.

Mary's father was Richard Carpenter aufbesserte his income by the fact that he was looking at the cliffs near Lyme Regis fossils, which he then sold to tourists. When he died of tuberculosis in 1810, the family was left without a breadwinner Anning and Mary and her brother Joseph began to search for fossils in a large scale, with the sale of which they aufbesserten the family income.

Collecting fossils had come into fashion in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Initially, not more than a hobby not unlike the collecting of stamps, you began to realize the importance of fossils to geology and biology. Began Mary Anning to make the collection by only their livelihood, they soon had connections to the geologists and biologists of their time.

The first occasion was the discovery of the skeleton of Ichthyosaurus, an ichthyosaur, a few months after the death of her father. My brother had a year earlier discovered a skull that looked like that of a large crocodile. The rest of the skeleton was initially not found to Mary after a storm, which tore away parts of the cliff, found the rest of the body. This was the first complete skeleton of an Ichthyosaurus, which had been found up to this point. Parts of skeletons were previously found and the type was described already in 1699 on the basis of fragments were discovered in Wales. However, the important discovery of a complete skeleton was included in the Transactions of the Royal Society. Mary Anning was at that time 12 years old.

The better known they fell to Thomas Birch, a wealthy fossil collector. From poverty touches Mary and her family, he sold his own collection of fossils for 400 British pounds, which went to the Anning family. With a now somewhat secure ( though still very small ) financial backing Mary continued their search for fossils continued even after her brother found work as an upholsterer.

Your next big fossil find was that of a Plesiosaurus dolichodeirus in 1821, the first one was found by this genre and was not surpassed in quality to this day. He was scientifically described by paleontologists and geologists William Conybeare. In 1828, she found a third major finding a pterosaur, by William Buckland in 1829 macronyx described as a pterodactyl ( Richard Owen presented the way later in the new genus Dimorphodon ), the first find outside Germany ( Gideon Mantell held its described in 1827 pterosaur fossils for remnants of a bird ).

With these three major findings Mary Anning found its place in paleontology. Their performance was not only to their exceptional talent, find fossils, but also in the care and patience with which they dug this. At the excavation of the Plesiosaurus, she worked for 10 years without support from the outside with the simplest tools. In addition, she was - never a scientific education of some kind enjoyed - both able to draw their findings competently than to describe accurately.

Mary Anning searched her entire life for fossils and contributed with their findings significantly to the development of early paleontology. As late thirties, she received an annual pension of the British Association for the Advancement of Science as a thank you for their services.

Mary Anning died at the age of 47 years to breast cancer. Some months earlier, she had been made ​​an honorary member of the Geological Society of London, in the normal women were not allowed membership.

Importance

Mary Annings findings were important evidence for the extinction of animal species. Until its time it was the general assumption that species do not become extinct; any strange find was declared as an animal that is still alive somewhere in an undiscovered part of the world. The bizarre nature of the fossils found Anning, underwent this argument and paved the way for the understanding of life in earlier geological periods.

The coast has made its findings on the Mary today one of the most famous sites for dinosaur fossils around the world. The oldest sections of the coast are from the Triassic and can be dated to an age of about 250 million years ago, the most recent layers date from the end of the Cretaceous period - thus they cover a large part of the Mesozoic, a world dominated by dinosaurs earth Poche, from. It is commonly called Jurassic Coast and is a World Heritage Site by UNESCO.

Mary Anning himself was after her death in oblivion, but was rediscovered in recent decades as one of the most important and the most extraordinary figures of the early paleontology.

Others

• It is generally believed that the old English tongue twister "She sells sea shells by the sea shore" is due to Mary Anning.
• More recently, it was also the subject of the song " Do You Know Mary Anning? " the group " Artichoke ".
• Tracy Chevalier published in 2009 the novel Remarkable Creatures, which has the life story of Mary and Elizabeth Philpot Annings the subject.