That woman, of course, is Charlotte Murchison, who many believe greatly influenced her husband’s research. Shortly after she died of breast cancer in 1847, the Geological Society of London marked her death in a president’s address, which was a rare honor. It’s one of many posthumous honors that Anning has been granted over the years. In 2018, the museum named several rooms after her as a celebration of her contributions to science. Currently, her Ichthyosaur, among several other fossils, is featured at the National History Museum in London. She sold her fossils to men for their personal collections, and when they then sold those pieces to museums, they received the credit instead of Anning. The scope of Anning’s work is also difficult to define. “There’s a tradition in British science for working class contributions to be written out of history because of what they were paid to do as an employee,” he says. Tucker says that because she was collecting fossils for money, the people she sold her work to simply viewed her as doing her job. Her working class status did not help matters either. The Society referenced Anning’s discoveries in their meetings, but it wasn’t until decades after her death that they began admitting women as members. The Geological Society of London, which was founded in 1807, refused to let Anning, or any other woman, become a member or attend their lectures. But Anning was never able to author her own paper because of her gender. Many of these men came to Anning for her guidance, and published their own papers, which were rooted in her work. She is even credited with influencing Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution-he cited her fossils in his book On the Origin of Species.Įven though Anning’s impact on paleontology was significant, she was not recognized for her contributions in the way that her male counterparts were at the time. “This was the period when people were beginning to question the age of the Earth and the biblical version as opposed to the scientific one.” Through the fossils Anning found, she was able to give the scientific community reason to think that species did not live forever, and that they evolved over time. “When Mary was alive, her life happened to coincide with what was described as the Heroic Age of geology,” Tucker explains. In 1823, Anning uncovered the first intact skeleton of a Plesiosaur, a nine-foot long reptile-like creature, which ushered in so much attention from geologists that it was heavily discussed at the Geological Society of London the following year. Anning’s instrumental work included her discovery of coprolites (fossilized feces), which began conversations about what animals, like dinosaurs, ate. Despite this, she continued to make discoveries that helped solidify several pillars of our understanding of science and geology, like the theory of extinction. In The Fossil Hunter, a 2009 biography of Anning, author Shelley Emling writes that the skeleton of this reptile was an even greater discovery than the skull: “Eventually news spread far and wide that a young girl from Lyme Regis had made an incredible find: an entire connected skeleton of a creature never before seen.”Īs a young woman growing up poor in the early 19th century, Anning received little formal education. Anning, at 12 years old, found the rest of the skeleton, which turned out to be not a crocodile but an Ichthyosaurus, a “fish-lizard”-a crucial discovery in the field of paleontology. Soon after, Anning’s brother uncovered what he believed to be a crocodile skull. David Tucker, the director of the Lyme Regis Museum and a geological advisor on the film, tells TIME that Anning encouraged women to get into the field: “Her legacy is increasingly her ability to inspire young women to become involved in science.” Her legacy is not only built on her groundbreaking research, but the doors she opened to women in a time when the scientific community was almost exclusively dominated by men. While the romantic nature of their relationship is fictionalized, these women were very much real, and played outsize roles in the fields of geology and paleontology.Īmmonite centers on Anning, a fossil collector whose discoveries helped shape what we know about paleontology today. The two women, who couldn’t be more different, develop intense feelings for one another that culminate in a passionate but messy romance. It’s a quiet movie, set against the backdrop of towering cliffs, muddy rocks and a dangerous sea shore. 4, follows Mary and Charlotte as they learn from each other out in the field, and eventually fall in love. The somber drama, directed by Francis Lee and releasing in some U.S.
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