Jurassic Mary: Mary Anning and the Primeval Monsters

By Patricia Pierce

Spinster Mary Anning, uneducated and poor, was of the wrong sex, wrong class and wrong religion, but fate decreed that she was exactly the right person in the right place and time to pioneer the emerging science of palaeontology, the study of fossils. Born in Lyme Regis in 1799, Mary learned to collect fossils with her cabinet-maker father. The unstable cliffs and stealthy sea made the task dangerous but after her father died the sale of fossils sustained her family. Mary’s fame started as an infant when she survived a lightning strike that killed the three adults around her. Then, aged twelve, she caught the public’s attention when she unearthed the skeleton of a ‘fish lizard’ or Ichthyosaurus. She later found the first Plesiosaurus giganteus, with its extraordinary long neck associated with the Loch Ness monster, and, dramatically, she unearthed the first, still rare, Dimorphodon macronyx, a frightening ‘flying dragon’ with hand claws and teeth. Yet her many discoveries were announced to the world by male geologists like the irrepressible William Buckland and Sir Henry De La Beche and they often received the credit. In Jurassic Mary Patricia Pierce redresses this imbalance, bringing to life the extraordinary, little-known story of this determined and pioneering woman.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The History Press
• Release date: Apr 20, 2006
• ISBN: 9780752495699

Reviews for Jurassic Mary

[thecrow2 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Mary Anning was truly an exceptional woman. Daughter of a carpenter, was a poor, uneducated woman, who became one of the first palaeontologist, respected by lots of scientists. Unfortunately this book not worthy this amazing life. Badly edited, discursive, jumping in space and time without any apparent reason and it talks a lot more about anything else but Mary Anning's life itself. Shame.

[untraveller · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A nice quick read....This meant much more to me than it might have since I was just recently this year in Lyme Regis. One judge of a book for me is how did it do in furthering my desire to read more on the subject....this did it as I am now interested in several of the books listed in a nice bibliography at the end. Early English geology leading up to Darwin might just become a new interest of mine....

[shanaqui_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I couldn't resist grabbing this when I came across it randomly in the library. I was hoping for more books on dinosaurs, but I'll take a biography of an amazing female scientist any day. The unfortunate thing about Mary Anning is that she wasn't treated as the professional she was. Or, rather, she was accepted as a professional fossil hunter, but she wasn't given the recognition she deserved. And unfortunately, a lot of what we know about her is framed by the male geologists and scientists who relied on her.Still, Patricia Pierce does a decent job of bringing Mary Anning to life and pointing out how amazing her achievements were, given her social context. I could do with less speculation about her romantic life, about which there appears to be not a shred of proof. Maybe she just wasn't interested? But that didn't take up too much space: it just struck me as falling into the trap of seeing Mary Anning the way her contemporaries would've, with too much emphasis on her being a 'spinster'.