Lyme Regis - the Town and Geology

Lyme Regis is situated on the Dorset coast of England. The town itself is unremarkable - but what makes the location remarkable was its situation some 200 mya¹. Put bluntly, it was at the bottom of an ocean. In this ocean swam belemnites (a creature similar to that of the modern squid or cuttlefish), ammonites (relatives of the modern nautilus), ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs, and dozens of species of fish. The area remained an ocean throughout the entirety of the Jurassic period². This was not the area's first exposure to extremes, as previous to the Jurassic period, during the Triassic period, it had been part of a mountainous desert region. As time went by the continents broke up, some sinking, some rising, and all changing significantly in one way or another.

During the Jurassic period, countless dramas of starvation, birth and death were played out. Most of the creatures living in the Jurassic seas ended up on the sea floor. It has been estimated that 0.1 per cent of all living things undergo the fossilisation process. Although this figure isn't terribly accurate³, it can nevertheless be used to illustrate that the oceans of the Jurassic period must have been full of life. On the Dorset coast alone, fossils can be found in profusion almost everywhere. There are areas of the coast around Lyme which are referred to as 'ammonite pavements'. These take the form of fossilised beach (imagine rippled sand turned to stone), with large ammonites laid edge to edge for up to fifty feet at a stretch. Ammonites of all different sizes and shapes can be found there, some of the most delightful are also the smallest, many of which are pyratised⁴.

Information concerning organised tours of the area can be obtained from the Heritage Centre of Charmouth which is just along the coast from Lyme Regis. Fossil shops abound in Lyme itself. You can go fossil hunting yourself along almost any stretch of the Dorset coast, but don't go alone. EXTREME CAUTION is advised, as tides can be treacherous, and cliff-falls are common.

Mary Anning

Mary Anning was struck by lightning at the age of one. The incident, at a fair, left her nurse and two other women dead. Though she recovered fully⁵, it was a tremendous shock to her mother, who had lost a daughter (also named Mary) a year and a half before. The demise of the first Mary had been a grievous blow - the poor mite had been trying to warm herself by an open fire in the midst of a cruel winter. Her clothing had caught fire, and she died of the burns received. The Annings had once been a large family - Richard and Molly producing nine children altogether. Of these, only Mary and Joseph survived the ravages of the era - smallpox, pneumonia, measles and malnutrition taking a heavy toll.

Her father, a carpenter, attempted to supplement his meagre income by collecting fossils (or 'curios') from the beaches below the cliffs. The Napoleonic Wars in Europe had forced the British gentry to summer at home, and Lyme Regis became a popular resort. The fossil curios were suddenly an indispensable gift for those at home, and local residents were quick to set up stalls laden with fossils outside their dwellings. Ammonites were sold as snake charms (sometimes with eyes painted on), and vertebrae were sold as 'verteberries'⁶

Compounding the family's misfortunes, Richard Anning fell to his death in 1810, aged 44. He apparently lost his footing, and fell from Black Ven (a local promontory), to be dashed against the beach below. To clear up a myth, it was not Mary who first located the ichthyosaur that would bring her fame, but her Brother Joseph. Coincidentally, he found the skull of the ichthyosaur in 1811, below Black Ven, and she found the rest of the fossil sometime later. Considering that this was the beach on which their father lost his life, it is perhaps not such a coincidence - they may have been visiting the spot a year after his fall for memorial purposes. Ichthyosaurs were not un-known before the discovery, but they were unnamed. They were initially thought to be the remains of an unknown crocodilian. This fossil, however, comprised the first (recorded) complete skeleton of an ichthyosaur. A local lord purchased the find, which enabled the Annings to eat in comfort for a half a year.

Throughout her life, Mary continued to comb the beach for curios, and her collection soon became unrivalled (if occasionally diminished by visitors). She is credited with finding the first almost complete plesiosaur, the first British pterodactyl, and squaloraja (a transitional fish, somewhere between sharks and rays). Her method for staying ahead of the competition was to dash out into the teeth of a gale, and collect what she could before the waves washed the valuable items away. The cliffs at Lyme are quite friable, and a good rainstorm is all that is required to precipitate a minor land-slide, exposing new fossils. Visits from prominent men of science were frequent, and she quickly built up a vocabulary sufficient to question and query the ideas of her academic callers. Given that she received little or no formal education, this is a good indication of her sharpness of mind. Although she remained relatively poor, this didn't stop her from helping those who were worse off still. There were many occupants of Lyme who frequently dipped below the bread line and received her help. Eventually, she managed to raise enough cash to open a little shop. Although this did not signal a great change in her fortunes, she was at least able to store her finds away from home.

Mary continued to run the gauntlet of high-tides and cliff-falls until breast cancer got the better of her. When her cancer took hold, and Mary could no longer spare the energy to go fossil hunting, one of her gentlemen friends, the famous William Buckland⁷, organised a pension for her, so she could at least live out the rest of her years without the worry of starvation, or the social embarrassment of having to fall upon the charity of an alms-house. She died when she was 49.

The Ideology of Her Era

Although Mary Anning spent most of her life in comparative poverty, she supplied the best intellectual minds of the time with ammunition for their geological theories. Ammunition may at first sound a harsh word to use, but in the context of the 1800's, it turns out to be extremely apt. The church were rallying against the geologists, and to the ranks of the geologist had been added a new and dangerous companion - the palaeontologist. Initially the palaeontologists and geologists were not of an atheistic bent, but their researches were presenting questions that the clergy were finding very difficult to answer. It was a given fact, for instance, that the earth was 6,000 years old.

The geologists were turning this date on its head. Given the data, there was simply not enough time for the various continents and their strata to have formed. The geologists needed more time, and something had to give. Thanks to the efforts of Henry VIII, three centuries previously, the Anglican church held sway in educational circles, dominating both Oxford and Cambridge universities. This put pressure on geologists wary of upsetting intellectual circles to proclaim both their belief in God, and the Old Testament from which these date calculations were derived. This pressure was difficult to alleviate, as the geologists had to compromise the tenets of their faith with the evidence which was presented before their eyes. Everyone, it seems, had difficulties envisaging the purpose of an Earth without a dominant ape species riding upon its crustal plates.

This predicament still concerns many theologians, but not many geologists. The argument raged through-out the century, re-surging when Darwin produced his opus, The Origin of the Species. It was circumvented by pushing back God's creation of the world to encompass evolution. God's role was, in effect, reduced to being a mere tinkerer with primordial atoms. This satisfied the minds of religious geologists, but is to this day irksome to the clergy who, under the glaring light of modern science, have had to reduce their creators role again and again, to the progenitor of the Big Bang.