Mary Anning

She was 12 when she dug a sea monster out of a cliff.

Who was Mary Anning?

Mary Anning was a fossil hunter who lived in Lyme Regis, a small town on the south coast of England. She was born in 1799 and spent almost her whole life walking the beaches below the cliffs, looking for the bones and shells of animals that lived millions of years ago. She found some of the first complete skeletons of giant sea reptiles ever discovered, and scientists still study her finds today.

A girl on the beach

Mary's father, Richard, made furniture for a living, but he loved to hunt for "curiosities" on the beach, and he took Mary and her brother Joseph with him. The cliffs at Lyme Regis are made of layers of rock that formed at the bottom of an ancient sea. Storms knock pieces loose, and inside those pieces are fossils: spiral ammonites, bullet-shaped belemnites, and sometimes bones. Mary learned to spot them when she was very small, and she learned to clean them with a chisel and a brush without breaking them.

The first big find

When Mary was 11, her father died, and the family had very little money. They sold the fossils they found to visitors. In 1811, Joseph found a strange skull in the cliff with a long snout and huge eye sockets. Over the next year, Mary dug out the rest of the skeleton, piece by piece. It was about 17 feet long. Scientists named it Ichthyosaurus, which means "fish lizard," but it was not a fish or a lizard. It was a sea reptile that lived in the time of the dinosaurs. Mary was about 12 years old.

Sea dragons

Mary kept hunting. In 1823 she found something even stranger: a skeleton with a tiny head, a very long neck, and four flippers. Some experts in London said it must be a fake, because no animal could have a neck that long. It was real. It was a Plesiosaurus, and Mary had found the first complete one. A few years later she found a flying reptile, a pterosaur, the first ever found in Britain. People in town started calling her finds "sea dragons."

The fossil shop

Mary opened a small shop in Lyme Regis called Anning's Fossil Depot. Collectors and scientists came from across Europe to buy from her and to ask her questions. She taught herself geology and anatomy from books, and she drew careful pictures of every bone. Many of the men who wrote scientific papers about her fossils learned what they knew from talking to her, but back then women were not allowed to join the scientific societies, and her name was often left off the papers. That was not fair, and people today are working to fix it.

What we kept

Mary Anning died in 1847, when she was 47. Her fossils are in museums in London and around the world. In 2010, the Royal Society named her one of the ten British women who most influenced the history of science. In 2022, her town put up a statue of her, with her dog Tray, looking out at the beach where she worked. Every time a kid finds an ammonite on a beach, they are doing what Mary did.

What's in the book

The 18 coloring scenes follow her life in order: Father Taught Her, A Girl on the Beach, Hammer and Basket, Walking the Tide, Ammonites, After the Storm, Hard Days, The First Big Find, Ichthyosaur, Town Street, The Fossil Shop, Sketching Bones, Plesiosaur, Scientists Visit, The Sea Keeps Secrets, What We Kept.

• A pronunciation page
• A map of the Jurassic Coast
• Fossil-hunting tips for your own beach walk
• The famous tongue twister that might be about Mary
• An "I Colored History" certificate