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Speaker 1: Hey everybody, it is Saturday, which means it's time for

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Speaker 1: a stuff you missed in History class classic. Today, we

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Speaker 1: are revisiting an episode from in the Sarah and to

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Speaker 1: Blina era. It is on Mary Anning, who during her

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Speaker 1: lifetime was nicknamed the Princess of paleontology. So here we go.

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff you Missed in History Class from how

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Speaker 1: Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.

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Speaker 1: I'm to bling a chalkoate boarding and I'm fair down

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Speaker 1: and researching. This episode's topic really took me back to

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Speaker 1: my childhood days digging for artifacts, fossils and the like

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Speaker 1: in my backyard and small town Alabama. I mean, did

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Speaker 1: you ever do this, Sarah? Did you look for treasures?

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Speaker 1: I did? I did, and I don't think I ever

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Speaker 1: came up with a whole lot more than old clay

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Speaker 1: plumbing pipe, so I mean, at least that's something. Well,

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Speaker 1: my friend Katie I actually had a game that we

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Speaker 1: made up was really a game, but we called it archaeologists,

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Speaker 1: and we would go to the trails behind my house

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Speaker 1: and come back with these big clumps of dirt and

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Speaker 1: then we would sit on my parents deck with my

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Speaker 1: dad's tools and like chisel at them and pretend like

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Speaker 1: we were finding things while we sang songs from the

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Speaker 1: movie Beaches. Yeah, he must have been really did when

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Speaker 1: Drastic Park came out, I was, I liked I liked

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Speaker 1: the book. I read the book before it came out,

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Speaker 1: and I was really excited about that movie. But yeah,

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Speaker 1: but of course in our little archaeologist game, we never

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Speaker 1: came up with anything, just piles of dirt, which I'm

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Speaker 1: sure my parents loved. But the subject of today's podcast,

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Speaker 1: Mary Anning, also started hunting for fossils in her hometown

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Speaker 1: in the early eighteen hundreds at a very young age,

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Speaker 1: but she made out much better than most kids. Anning

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Speaker 1: not only found many authentic fossils, she found entire skeletons

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Speaker 1: of prehistoric creatures, and it is often considered a key

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Speaker 1: player in the development of paleontology as science. All of

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Speaker 1: this happened even before the term dinosaur even existed. She

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Speaker 1: didn't even know exactly what she was trying to find

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Speaker 1: with these what we're certainly more than games. So in fact,

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Speaker 1: she's been called quote one of the most accomplished fossil

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Speaker 1: hunters of her time, and some scientists even believe her

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Speaker 1: work may have contributed to the theories of Charles Darwin himself.

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Speaker 1: But Mary Anning wasn't fossil hunting for the sake of

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Speaker 1: science alone, and she wasn't just doing it for childhood

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Speaker 1: kicks either. Like like us to Blena, We're going to

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Speaker 1: take a look today at what exactly motivated this prolific

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Speaker 1: paleontologist and why if she's linked to the likes of

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Speaker 1: men like Charles Darwin and other prominent scientists, her name

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Speaker 1: isn't nearly as well known as you might expect it

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Speaker 1: to be. First, though, we need to give you a

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Speaker 1: little bit of background on where Mary Annie lived, because

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Speaker 1: it certainly gave her a distinct advantage as a fossil hunter.

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Speaker 1: She was born and lived her entire life in a

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Speaker 1: town called Lime Regis on England Channel coast. In the

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Speaker 1: late eighteenth century, this became a really fashionable resort area

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Speaker 1: and has been featured in books including Jane Austen's Persuasion

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Speaker 1: and John fouls The French Lieutenants Woman. But according to

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Speaker 1: an article by Michael A. Taylor and U. S. Torrens

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Speaker 1: in Natural History, way before it became a resort town

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Speaker 1: two hundred million years ago. In fact, Lime Regis, along

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Speaker 1: with the rest of southern Britain, was submerged under tropical

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Speaker 1: sea near the equator, so animals that died in those

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Speaker 1: waters often ended up embedded and preserved in the mud

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Speaker 1: of that submerged land. And that's why this region, the

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Speaker 1: English Channel coast of southern England known as the Jurassic Coast,

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Speaker 1: has been so abundant in fossils. It just seems to

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Speaker 1: have an almost never ending supply of them. And Lime

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Speaker 1: Regius in particular is surrounded by cliffs composed of alternating

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Speaker 1: bands of limestone and slate which are constantly being eroded

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Speaker 1: by the elements, and every time they are eroded a

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Speaker 1: little bit more they reveal all kinds of fossilized treasures.

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Speaker 1: And according to Encyclopedia Britannica, the cliffs date from the

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Speaker 1: late Jurassic to Early Jurassic period, so about two million

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Speaker 1: to one hundred and seventy six million years ago, so

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Speaker 1: there's plenty of time to have stored up lots of fossils.

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Speaker 1: So that's just a basic, not to science e snapshot

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Speaker 1: of the area where Mary Annie was born May one,

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Speaker 1: and she was one of somewhere around ten kids of

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Speaker 1: a poor cabinet maker named Richard Anning and his wife

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Speaker 1: Mary Moore, now the Annie's, which is part of why

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Speaker 1: we don't exactly know how many kids they had. They

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Speaker 1: had it pretty rough as far as their kids were concerned.

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Speaker 1: Only two children and that was Mary and her older

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Speaker 1: brother Joseph, managed to survive. All the other children were

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Speaker 1: lost to illness or accident along the way, and there

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Speaker 1: was even another child called Mary before the Mary we're

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Speaker 1: focusing on in this episode came around and according to

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Speaker 1: a two thousand five article in British Heritage are Mary

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Speaker 1: covered in this podcast had a narrow escape of her

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Speaker 1: own as a child. When she was only about a

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Speaker 1: year old, she and her nursemaid got caught out in

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Speaker 1: a pretty bad thunderstorm, and when the nursemaid took Mary

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Speaker 1: and sought shelter along with a couple of other people

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Speaker 1: underneath a big tree, the tree got struck by lightning

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Speaker 1: and killed all the three adults underneath the tree and

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Speaker 1: burned Mary pretty badly too. When Mary was found, in fact,

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Speaker 1: everyone thought that she was dead too, but they managed

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Speaker 1: to revive her, and according to her family, this event

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Speaker 1: really changed their child. Somehow she was considered quote dull before,

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Speaker 1: but after, I mean for a one year old, I'm

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Speaker 1: not sure, but after this event she became really intelligent

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Speaker 1: and lively and grew up that way too. So to

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Speaker 1: her family, it seemed like the lightning had changed the

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Speaker 1: course of Mary's life, being struck by lightning. And as

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Speaker 1: we mentioned earlier, around the time that Mary was born,

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Speaker 1: Limeary just started becoming a hotspot for vacationers and that

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Speaker 1: created a market for what we're known as local curios

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Speaker 1: or curiosities. Local townspeople would collect and pedal fossils for cash,

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Speaker 1: and this included fossil shells which they called lady fingers,

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Speaker 1: and stones that looked like pieces of backbone, which they

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Speaker 1: called vertebarries. Um sounds like a new cereal, it does.

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Speaker 1: Most people involved in these sorts of transactions, of course,

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Speaker 1: had no idea that the items were fossils. Tourists were

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Speaker 1: just mainly buying them as souvenirs cho kind of exactly.

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Speaker 1: And Mary's father, Richard, was one of these amateur fossil collectors,

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Speaker 1: and he would sell these curiosities to tourists and it

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Speaker 1: became a major source of income for his entire family,

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Speaker 1: and Mary of course became pretty interested in these curious too.

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Speaker 1: She'd go along with her father, sometimes collecting fossiles, collecting

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Speaker 1: shells along the shores, and even climbing around the cliffs

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Speaker 1: looking for things. And on these outings, Mary learned how

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Speaker 1: to feel out her fines and carefully remove items that

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Speaker 1: were lodged into the cliffs and to bleed. It sounds

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Speaker 1: like you already know how to do this with your

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Speaker 1: with your mud fines carefully. I don't know about the

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Speaker 1: cliffs part of it, though, Sarah, I don't like heights,

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Speaker 1: would probably just stay on the ground. But I mean,

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Speaker 1: even then, climbing around cliffs wasn't exactly the safest hobby

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Speaker 1: you could have after all. And in eighteen ten, Richard

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Speaker 1: Anne actually had an accident while he was hunting for fossils.

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Speaker 1: Some sources say that he fell from a cliff, others

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Speaker 1: say that he was caught in a rock slide, but

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Speaker 1: either way, he died soon afterward. Mary was of course devastated,

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Speaker 1: but she kept hunting for fossils like she would have

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Speaker 1: anyway with her father, perhaps as a way to remember him.

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Speaker 1: And then one day she sold a fossil this kind

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Speaker 1: of coiled shell known as a snake stone to a tourist,

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Speaker 1: and it's sort of lit a fire under her. She

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Speaker 1: realized that her hobby could be lucrative, you know, she

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Speaker 1: could help supplement some of that income her family had

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Speaker 1: lost with the death of her father. They really needed

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Speaker 1: money now more than ever, so she started to hit

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Speaker 1: the beach even harder, looking for fossil fines in order

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Speaker 1: to help support her family. And then in eighteen eleven,

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Speaker 1: the year after her father's death, her brother Joseph found

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Speaker 1: this huge skull on the beach and he wasn't sure

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Speaker 1: what it was exactly. It appeared to be kind of

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Speaker 1: similar to a crocodile skull, and he showed it to Mary,

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Speaker 1: who was twelve years old at the time, but according

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Speaker 1: to that British Heritage article that we mentioned earlier, a

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Speaker 1: month's slide covered their find before they could really do

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Speaker 1: anything about it. About a year later, though, Mary rediscovered

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Speaker 1: fossils in that area and excavated them, and it turned

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Speaker 1: out to be the entire seventeen foot long skeleton of

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Speaker 1: an Ichthyosaurus, a prehistoric marine reptile that's kind of similar

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Speaker 1: in the way it looks to a dolphin. The source

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Speaker 1: translates to fish lizard. According to Taylor and Torren's article,

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Speaker 1: this wasn't the first iosurd to be discovered, but it

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Speaker 1: did become the quote type specimen of the Atheosaurus, the

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Speaker 1: scientifically described specimen for which the genus was officially named.

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Speaker 1: And as you can imagine, a fine like that would

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Speaker 1: command better prices than what you get from your average tourists,

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Speaker 1: better than shells that like. Mary ended up selling this

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Speaker 1: to Henry hast Henley, who was the chief property owner

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Speaker 1: in the area, for twenty three pounds, which was a

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Speaker 1: huge amount. It's the equivalent of several thousand pounds today,

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Speaker 1: so for Mary's poor family, this was a huge deal.

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Speaker 1: It took years of study for scientists to settle on

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Speaker 1: exactly what Mary's find was, but it caused a lot

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Speaker 1: of buzz in the scientific community and the religious community

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Speaker 1: as well, because around this time religion still had a

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Speaker 1: very big influence on science, and scientists really tried to

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Speaker 1: fit their findings into the Bible story of creation. So basically,

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Speaker 1: the belief was that God had created the earth only

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Speaker 1: about six thousand years prior to this time, and everything

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Speaker 1: had remained essentially unchanged since Noah and the flood. So

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Speaker 1: there were all these animals, and they all appeared on

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Speaker 1: Earth at the same time, and they were all as

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Speaker 1: they were. And as a result, for some time, people

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Speaker 1: believed that fossils such as even things like masted on bones,

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Speaker 1: were the remains of animals that still existed somewhere on

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Speaker 1: the planet. But of course, as more fossil finds like

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Speaker 1: Mary's came to life and the fossil Eve's creatures became

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Speaker 1: more and more exotic, like an Acosaurus, people finally had

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Speaker 1: to start accepting the possibility that creatures could become extinct.

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Speaker 1: And this is the part that many believe helped Charles

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Speaker 1: Darwin make the case for natural selection by introducing the

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Speaker 1: idea that some species could really disappear forever. Mary, though,

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Speaker 1: wasn't coming at her work from the position of a

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Speaker 1: scientist or even what was known as a quote gentleman collector.

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Speaker 1: Her family largely depended on her finds to live, and

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Speaker 1: so she continued to hunt for fossils pretty much every

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Speaker 1: single day, but it was many years before she had

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Speaker 1: another big find, and in the meantime business was pretty spotty.

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Speaker 1: Sometimes she wouldn't find much besides souvenir level kind of stuff,

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Speaker 1: and her family struggled, and at other times she made

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Speaker 1: sales to private collectors into museums and had a little

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Speaker 1: bit of money. A lot of her best finds were

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Speaker 1: in the winter, because that's when the erosion made the

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Speaker 1: most difference in what she could find. Probably not as

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Speaker 1: many tourists around too, I bet picking up all the

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Speaker 1: good stuff. True. In the years before eighteen twenty, though,

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Speaker 1: things really got so bad for the Innings. At one

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Speaker 1: point they were apparently selling furniture to pay their rent

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Speaker 1: that a collector named Thomas Burch, who had purchased things

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Speaker 1: for Mary, auctioned his collection and donated the proceeds to

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Speaker 1: the Inning family, and this started a rumor that the

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Speaker 1: fifty two year old Birch and the twenty one year

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Speaker 1: old Mary had a sexual relationship. But around things finally

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Speaker 1: started to turn around for Mary. She found a twenty

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Speaker 1: foot theosaur and a couple additional smaller ones over the

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Speaker 1: following year. Then in eight four she made what's considered

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Speaker 1: her most famous find. Yeah, she discovered the first intact

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Speaker 1: plesiosaurus skeleton. This animal had never been seen before. It

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Speaker 1: was also a marine animal, but totally different from an ichthyosaurus.

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Speaker 1: The plesiosaur had a long neck and a fat body,

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Speaker 1: and looked more like a lizard than a fish. British

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Speaker 1: geologist William Buckland described it thus, he said, quote to

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Speaker 1: the head of the lizard united the teeth of the crocodile,

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Speaker 1: a neck of enormous length resembling the body of a serpent,

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Speaker 1: a trunk and tail having the proportions of an ordinary quadruped,

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Speaker 1: and the ribs of a chameleon, and the paddles of

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Speaker 1: a whale. So it sounds like quite a creature. And

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Speaker 1: she sold the skeleton to the Duke of Buckingham for

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Speaker 1: two owns. And it was really so weird looking that

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Speaker 1: some people, including the renowned French zoologist George Cuvier, doubted

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Speaker 1: it was real. Kuvier thought that Mary had faked the

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Speaker 1: whole thing, but upon further study he realized it was

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Speaker 1: in fact a real specimen. And after QBA authenticated the

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Speaker 1: find many people started to take Mary's fossil findings a

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Speaker 1: little more seriously. You know, this lady actually knew what

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Speaker 1: was going on, and she did continue to make discoveries too.

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Speaker 1: In December eighteen twenty eight, she found the fossil of

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Speaker 1: a flying reptile. It was a raven size skeleton that,

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Speaker 1: according to some sources, represented the first evidence of a

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Speaker 1: prehistoric winged creature, even though according to Encyclopedia Britannica, it

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Speaker 1: was the pterosaur specimen found first outside of Germany, so

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Speaker 1: the first one found somewhere besides Germany. So Buckland bought

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Speaker 1: the skeleton from Mary and gave it the name Pterodactylus macronics,

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Speaker 1: meaning winged fingers, And just a year later, in eighteen

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Speaker 1: twenty nine, Mary found the skeleton of a fish like

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Speaker 1: creature called a school lur ja, which many many believed

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Speaker 1: was an evolutionary intermediary between sharks and rays. So ultimately,

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Speaker 1: with all these fossils coming up in her hands, Mary

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Speaker 1: became something of a local celebrity. She was called the

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Speaker 1: fossil Woman and the Princess of paleontology, a nickname given

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Speaker 1: to her by a German scientist, and she really put

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Speaker 1: her hometown on the map too for the scientific community.

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Speaker 1: People had known that this area was rich in fossils before,

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Speaker 1: but Mary's discovery started to attract scientists who wanted to

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Speaker 1: work with her. A really big deal because at the time,

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Speaker 1: women in science were still pretty rare, so she'd go

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Speaker 1: on fossil hunting expeditions with famous scientists like Buckland and

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Speaker 1: paleontologist Richard Owen, who's credited with coining the term dinosauria

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Speaker 1: in eighteen forty two. So um getting out there with

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Speaker 1: the major players in the field at the time, and

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Speaker 1: though Mary lacked any sort of formal scientific training, she

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Speaker 1: managed to press these rather impressive science guys, not just

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Speaker 1: because of her knowledge of the local area in which

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Speaker 1: she was fossil hunting, but she seemed to understand the

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Speaker 1: anatomy of the creatures that she was excavating, and would

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Speaker 1: even argue with established researchers on certain points. Non scientists

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Speaker 1: would often come just to check Mary out, too, because

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Speaker 1: she was kind of a character. Some described her as

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Speaker 1: a quote prim pedantic vinegar looking thin female, and others

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Speaker 1: described her as a quote strong, energetic spinster. Still others

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Speaker 1: as a quote clever, funny creature. So she herself was

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Speaker 1: kind of a curiosity for better or worse, it sounds so. Unfortunately, though,

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Speaker 1: Mary often didn't get credit for these fossil findes, and

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Speaker 1: this is partly because many scientists didn't give her credit

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Speaker 1: in books and papers they published on her discoveries, and

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Speaker 1: then partly because her role in the whole fossil collecting

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Speaker 1: business was in the trade aspect of it. She wasn't

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Speaker 1: writing the papers, she wasn't holding them in collections, and

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Speaker 1: according to Encyclopedia Britannica, it was the collectors who would

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Speaker 1: donate these specimens to institutions like museums and who would

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Speaker 1: usually get credited with their discovery. A few scientists did

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Speaker 1: give her credit in their work, but not as many

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Speaker 1: as should have, according to that British Heritage article we

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Speaker 1: mentioned earlier. She knew that too. Apparently a friend once

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Speaker 1: said quote she says, the world has used her ill.

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Speaker 1: These men of learning have sucked her brains and made

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Speaker 1: a great deal by publishing works of which she furnished

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Speaker 1: the contents, while she derived none of the advantages. She

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Speaker 1: was even denied admission to the Geological Society of London

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Speaker 1: despite her accomplishments, because they didn't allow women in the

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Speaker 1: organization at that time, though they finally made her an

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Speaker 1: honorary member, not an official member, but an honorary member

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Speaker 1: in seven. She didn't let any of that resentment stop

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Speaker 1: her from practicing her trade, though right up until the end.

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Speaker 1: According to a profile on Mary Anning by Alex k Rich,

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Speaker 1: she bought a house for herself and her mother and

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Speaker 1: they ran a store out of it, from which they

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Speaker 1: sold fossils, and they called the whole thing Fossil Depot,

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Speaker 1: which is rather charming. Mary died of breast cancer on

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Speaker 1: March nine, and to commemorate her achievements, the townspeople installed

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Speaker 1: a stained glass window depicting her image in the town's

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Speaker 1: church and a plaque too, near the cliffs where she

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Speaker 1: had first discovered that original I sur. And of course

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Speaker 1: you can still see her finds around the head of

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Speaker 1: the first I surs she discovered can be found. I

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Speaker 1: think I believe it can still be found in the

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Speaker 1: Natural History Museum in London. And there's another way that

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Speaker 1: you may have unwittingly remembered her throughout the years of

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Speaker 1: your life. Mary may have been the inspiration for the

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Speaker 1: well known tongue twister. She sells sea shells by the seashore.

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Speaker 1: So if you sort of remember back to the beginning

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Speaker 1: of the podcast when we're talking about how she used

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Speaker 1: to try to sell those shells to tourists, those fossil

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Speaker 1: ize shells. That's where that could have come from. And

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Speaker 1: it was written by English songwriter Terry Sullivan in nineteen

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Speaker 1: o eight, and act go something like this. I'm gonna

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Speaker 1: say it really slow because it is a tongue twister.

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Speaker 1: After all, she sells sea shells on the sea shore.

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Speaker 1: The shells she sells are sea shells, I'm sure for

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Speaker 1: if she sells sea shells on the sea shore, then

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Speaker 1: I'm sure she sells sea shore shells. Almost I kind

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Speaker 1: of fell apart there at the end. I was I

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Speaker 1: was testing this out before we went into recording, and

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Speaker 1: I was thinking, like, you know, the she sells sea

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Speaker 1: shells by the sea shore, because you probably have been

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Speaker 1: practicing that one. I mean, not practicing, like getting ready

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Speaker 1: for this moment, but you know, you've known it since

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Speaker 1: you're early fossil hunting, right, you kind of get the

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Speaker 1: cadence of it. But when you get these other ones

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Speaker 1: thrown in, it's sort of, oh my god. The shopper

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Speaker 1: I'm imagining that are our listeners who listen to the

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Speaker 1: podcast to practice their English are probably wondering what on

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Speaker 1: earth has happened right now? That's true. I mean, I

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Speaker 1: don't know how ubiquitous these tongue twisters are, but yeah,

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Speaker 1: for novice English speakers, maybe the ultimate. Maybe wait, awhile

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Speaker 1: before you try to tackle this one. It's tough. So anyway,

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Speaker 1: I thought that would be a fun way to kind

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Speaker 1: of end off this podcast about Mary anning Um with

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Speaker 1: this tongue twister that I didn't even realize there was

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Speaker 1: an inspiration for it. I thought people just kind of

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Speaker 1: pulled these things out of the air. I know, is

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Speaker 1: there a Peter Piper to Chuck Chuck, rubber Baby, Buggy Bumper,

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Speaker 1: I don't know. I mean, I'm gonna have to go

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Speaker 1: start googling tongue twisters now and find out if they

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Speaker 1: could be a series stories. Fine, thank you so much

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Speaker 1: for joining us for this Saturday classic. Since this is

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Speaker 1: out of the archive, if you heard an email address

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Speaker 1: or a Facebook U r L or something similar during

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Speaker 1: the course of the show, that may be obsolete. Now.

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Speaker 1: So here's our current contact information. We are at History

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Speaker 1: Podcast at how Stuff Works dot com, and then we're

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Speaker 1: at Missed in His Street. All over social media that

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Speaker 1: is our name on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, and Instagram.

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Speaker 1: Thanks again for listening for more on this and thousands

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Speaker 1: of other topics. Visit how staff works dot com.