Mary Anning, 1st woman paleontologist, has a biography made at least 175 years ago found

Perhaps more famous today than ever due to the proliferation of works depicting her story, the British Mary Anning, considered the first woman in paleontology, had not yet had a biography written in her life published.

Scientists Michael Taylor, from the Natural History Museum of Scotland, and Michael Benton, from the University of Bristol, found the first biographical text of Anning, made at least 175 years ago, in a memoir that was kept in the library of the University of Bristol.

The biography was published in this Wednesday’s edition (11) of the specialized magazine Journal of the Geological Society.

Dated between 1837 and 1847 (the exact date could not be determined), the manuscript has been attributed to George Roberts (1804–1860), a historian and teacher who taught at a school opposite the Anning family store.

For the researchers, the attribution of authorship is indisputable based on the analysis of the handwriting and other texts published by Roberts, and also because he reported the daily life of the young naturalist.

Born in 1799 in the town of Lyme Regis, in southern England, Mary Anning was the daughter of a merchant who sold rugs, art objects and fossils discovered on the Dorset coast. Struck by lightning when she was just one year old, the biography describes Anning after the episode as “lively and intelligent” and “who fed the curiosity of anatomists” with the fossils she found.

It’s not for less. At the age of ten, Anning found the first fossil, an ammonite – a species of extinct mollusk that had a shell with hundreds of chambers –, but his most important and remembered discoveries until today were the skeletons of large marine reptiles, such as ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs.

Her father, Richard Anning, died when she was just 12 years old, and the young woman took over the family store. The growing interest in fossils and the discovery of complete skeletons took the name of the paleontologist to circles of well-known scientists at the time, who began to publish her findings in scientific journals.

One such find was described in 1818 by paleontologist Everard Home (1756–1832) named Icthyosaurus, meaning “reptilian fish”. Currently, the Natural History Museum in London has a full-room display of the Anning fossils.

Anning died at the age of 47, in 1847, of breast cancer, as Roberts’ own text tells, and was never accepted by the circle of researchers of the Geological Society of London. For the last nine years before her death, she received a pension from the Geological Society of £23 a year (equivalent to about £2,400 corrected for inflation).

The authors claim, however, that the format of the writing and an addendum at the end of the text —the ink used on the paper differs from the other three pages— reporting the death reinforce the idea that Roberts’ intention was to tell Anning’s story, and not the fossils or the geology of the region.

Later, other geologists and paleontologists published obituaries of Anning in scientific journals at the time, including one similar to the text by Roberts published in the journal Athenæum, but the authorship of the text is anonymous.

According to the authors of the article in the Geological Society, the fact that Roberts lived with Anning and also reported her importance in another publication, in 1834, makes the unpublished biography the closest to a history of the paleontologist in life ever found.

Anning’s account, however, is a bit infantile, as in other obituaries released after her death, a stereotype reinforced by her being a woman.

“Compared to other obituaries he published, however, it is not possible to say that it was simply because she was a woman, except that perhaps, because she had no academic training, she had no formal documents to her credit”, say the authors.

The fact is, more than 175 years after her death, Mary Anning still inspires women and girl scientists around the world.