Dorset Family Search

Mary Anning (1799-1847) made several important discoveries as an amateur fossil collector in the first half of the nineteenth century, including a nearly complete skeleton of an Ichthyosaur. Her findings were key to the development paleontology as a scientific discipline in Britain.

Anning was born on May 21, 1799, in Lyme Regis, Dorset, England, the daughter of Richard and Mary Moore Anning. The Annings had nearly ten children, but only Mary and her elder brother Joseph survived to adulthood. On August 19, 1800, Anning narrowly escaped death during a lightening storm. She was one of four people who found shelter under an elm tree in Rack Field near Lyme Regis. Only Anning survived when the tree was struck by lightening. Local legend had it that her intelligence increased significantly after the incident.

Richard Anning made his living as a cabinet maker and carpenter. As a hobby and for extra income, he collected fossils. They were cleaned, polished, and sold to summer tourists. The area in which the Annings lived was rich with fossils. Their hometown, Lyme Regis, was located on the southwest coast of England. About 200 million years earlier, the region had been a sea bottom, where numerous dinosaur remains were fossilized after their death. As sea level fell, these fossils could be found on the beach and above it, especially in the exposed rocky cliffs. Richard Anning was among the first to take advantage of the tourist trade, which
increased as Lyme Regis became a summer resort seaside town in the late 1700s. A popular item was what the locals dubbed “curiosities,” a coiled shell. Later, it was determined that these shells were ammonites, a type of mollusk that lived in the Jurassic Period.

Richard Anning was not the only townsperson to sell collected fossils, but he did interest his whole family in the enterprise, including daughter Mary. Anning had only a limited education, perhaps only a few years in a parish school, but she learned much about the business and the fossils from her father. She developed extraordinary skills in fossil collecting. Her abilities came in handy when Richard Anning died in 1810, leaving his family destitute and in debt for £120. He had been suffering from consumption and had fallen off a cliff before his death. Her brother Joseph was already working as an apprentice to an upholsterer, so the burden of providing an income for the family fell to Anning and her mother. Anning viewed fossil collecting as their only means of support, except for charity given to the family by their local parish from 1811 until 1815.

Discovered Ichthyosaur

In 1811 or 1812, Anning made her first important discovery. Though sources differ on the sequence of events and who was involved, it is clear that Anning was primarily responsible for the finding of a well-preserved, nearly complete skeleton of what came to be called an Ichthysaurus (”fish-lizard”). Some said that her brother Joseph found the skull first, or they found the head together, separate from the rest of the body. Others believed that Anning found the whole fossil on her own. Anning then hired workers to dig out the block in which it was embedded. In any case, the ten-meter (30 feet) long skeleton created a sensation and made Anning famous. She sold it to Henry Hoste Henley, a local collector, for £23. Eventually it made its way to the London Museum of Natural History, and a debate ensued over what to name the creature, a marine reptile with a long body and tail, small limbs, and trim head. It was dubbed Ichthysaurus in 1817.

This discovery was important to science as well as Anning’s livelihood. Though life in the Anning family was difficult for the next decade, Anning herself was developing important skills. She became a good observer, who could provide vital information to scientists. She knew the area well and became expert at predicting where fossils might be found after storms. Anning also became adept at removing the fossils without causing ant damage. Though Anning and her mother were the primary fossil hunters, they was often accompanied by her brother or a local friend, Henry De le Beche, who later became a geologist. The family was also aided by Thomas James Birch, who helped them sell many of their fossils before Anning became an adult.

Discovered Complete Plesiosaurus

It’s our family custom to go to the Pilot Boat pub in Lyme Regis for lunch on New Year’s Eve, and to discuss the coming 12 months. It was at the Pilot Boat that we first decided to get a cat, and I now can’t imagine life without Nelson. He’s just greeted me on my solo return from Dorset with a combination of excitement, purring affection and just a suspicion of reproach in his eyes that moved me to tears. Ever since Nelson came into our lives, I’ve wanted to get a dog, too, and each year at the Pilot Boat my wife and son firmly veto the suggestion on the grounds that it’s impractical, Nelson would be furious and Mrs S. would end up doing all the walking.

Yet I ache for a dog as I once ached for a drink.

But our individual resolutions are the main items on the agenda, and this year we came up with about half a dozen each. The two that are giving me so much grief are, firstly, to stop smoking before my 51st birthday on 4 March and, secondly, to spend less on CDs.

I had my first cigarette when I was eight, became a confirmed addict by the age of 14, gave up briefly when I left university, but became a 40-a-day man when I got my first job on Fleet Street. Then, in 1997, I somehow managed to quit and I stayed stopped for more than three years.

The problem was that at least partly as a result of giving up smoking, my already heavy binge-drinking crossed the line into full-blown alcoholism, as drink came to replace many of the little rewards and consolations previously afforded by cigarettes.

In the autumn of 2000, I was admitted to the Priory, and on my second day there I sent out for a packet of Benson & Hedges (you weren’t allowed off the premises for the first ten days). It was so long since I’d had a fag, and I smoked so many, so quickly, that I had to leave a group therapy session in a hurry in order to throw up in the lavatory. The counsellors thought it was the secondary phase of alcoholic withdrawal and sent me to bed for the afternoon, but it was merely nicotine poisoning.

I persevered, however — it’s amazing what discomfort addicts will endure in order to achieve a passing pleasure — and soon got the knack of it again, especially when I’d ditched the horrid Bensons in favour of lovely Golden Virginia roll-ups.

The idea of facing life without them now seems every bit as terrifying as learning to live without the booze.

There are so many things I love about smoking — the satisfying little burn at the back of the throat; the craftsmanship required to make the perfect roll-up; the feeling that you are part of a defiant gang of social outlaws. Indeed, one of my chief regrets about giving up is that it will also stub out the little warm glow of defiance that comes with each cigarette, when every delightful drag feels like a brave blow against the Blairite nanny state. And I’m terrified that writing will seem even harder, indeed downright impossible, without the regular punctuation of fags.

But I’m sick of being addicted to tobacco. I hate stumbling out of bed as soon as I wake up because I’ve got to get into my study (the one room in the house where my smoking is reluctantly tolerated) to have that vital first fix. I don’t enjoy feeling like death if I have to run 100 yards. I panic about incipient lung cancer, emphysema or a heart attack. And I owe it to Nicki and Ed to quit, who both hate my smoking with a passion.

I know it will be hell at first, but surely it can’t be impossible with the help of patches and nicotine chewing gum? The trouble is that if I do manage to stop — and there will be hell to pay in our house if I don’t — I’m going to want to reward myself with loads of lovely new CDs, and those, too, are proscribed on the New Year’s list. And I’ve just thought of another bloody resolution. I really must try to write more about old pop music in this column. But how can I do that if I’m not allowed the occasional binge in HMV? God, life’s complicated.

Perhaps it would be easier with a dog. I’d better put on Brownsville Station’s gloriously raucous ‘Smokin’ in the Boys’ Room’ and have another cigarette while I think about it.

The British anthropologist Louis Seymour Bazett Leakey (1903-1972) made major contributions to the study of prehistoric man.

The parents of L. S. B. Leakey were British missionaries who settled at Kabete, Kenya, near Nairobi, in 1901. Leakey was born on Aug. 7, 1903, in Kabete, where he formed lifelong friendships with boys of the Kikuyu tribe, with whom he grew up. He is probably the only white man to have been initiated from youth to manhood in a Kikuyu ceremony.

After World War I Leakey went briefly to school at Weymouth College, Dorset, England, and in 1922 he entered St. John’s College, Cambridge University. In 1923 he organized an expedition of the British Museum to search for dinosaurs in southern Tanganyika.

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In 1926, after qualifying in anthropology at Cambridge, Leakey organized and led four East African archeological expeditions. During the third expedition, in 1931, after some very important discoveries of the earliest known (at that time) stone tools at Olduvai, Leakey discovered fossils of human remains at Kanam and Kanjera in Kenya. His claims concerning these fossils, which included the idea that Homo sapiens lived in East Africa at the end of the Middle Pleistocene, were contested by many of his colleagues, and it was only in 1969 that the claims received official acceptance.

In 1937 Leakey temporarily ceased to study prehistory in order to spend 3 years working on a monograph of the Kikuyu tribe. During World War II (1939-1945) he served as officer in charge of civil intelligence in Nairobi.

Leakey always strongly supported Charles Darwin’s theory that both man and the great apes originated on the African continent. For 40 years he and his teams patiently excavated at the prehistoric site at Olduvai Gorge on the eastern Serengeti Plains of Tanzania. In 1959 at Olduvai a fossil hominid skull was discovered, which he named Zinjanthropus . In 1960 even more important fossil fragments were discovered. These and a skull found in 1962 at Olduvai were made the types of a new species of man, Homo habilis. In 1962 Leakey also discovered a skull of the type Homo erectus, previously known only in China and Java. Other sites excavated by Leakey include the Lower Miocene sites on Rusinga Island and Songhor, which have yielded remains of protoman dating back 20 million years, and the site at Fort Ternan, where Kenya pithecus wickeri
was discovered. This hominid lived about 12 million years ago.

In 1964 Leakey organized a team in the United States to excavate near the Calico Mountains in southern California. He and his team discovered evidence that man lived in America more than 50,000 years ago.

Leakey’s publications include New Classification of Bow and Arrow in Africa; The Stone Age Cultures of Kenya; Adam’s Ancestors; The Stone Age Races of Kenya; Stone Age Africa; Kenya Contrasts and Problems; White African; A Contribution to the Study of the Tumbian Culture in Kenya (with W. E. Owen); Tentative Study of the Pleistocene Sequence and Stone Age Cultures of N. E. Angola; Mau Mau and Kikuyu; Defeating Mau Mau; The Miocene Hominoidea of East Africa (with Le Gros Clark); The Pleistocene Fossil Suidae of East Africa; First Lessons in Kikuyu; Olduvai Gorge, vol. 1, 1951-1961; Animals of East Africa; and Unveiling Man’s Origins (with Vanne Goodall).

On Oct. 1, 1972, Leakey died in London.