Читать книгу The Dinosaur Hunters: A True Story of Scientific Rivalry and the Discovery of the Prehistoric World - Deborah Cadbury, Deborah Cadbury - Страница 6

She sells sea-shells on the sea-shore,

The shells she sells are sea-shells, I’m sure

For if she sells sea-shells on the sea-shore

Then I’m sure she sells sea-shore shells.

Tongue-twister by Terry Sullivan, 1908,

associated with Mary Anning

On the south coast of England at Lyme Regis in Dorset, the cliffs tower over the surrounding landscape. The town hugs the coast under the lee of a hill that protects it from the south-westerly wind. To the west, the harbour is sheltered by the Cobb, a long, curling sea wall stretching out into the English Channel – the waves breaking ceaselessly along its perimeter. To the east, the boundary of the local graveyard clings to the disintegrating Church Cliffs, with lichen-covered gravestones jutting out to the sky at awkward angles. Beyond this runs the dark, forbidding crag face of Black Ven, damp from sea spray. The landscape then levels off across extensive sweeps of country, to where the cliffs dip to the town of Charmouth, before rising sharply again to form the great heights of Golden Cap.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, according to local folklore, the stones on Lyme Bay were considered so distinctive that smugglers running ashore on ‘blind’ nights knew their whereabouts just from a handful of pebbles. However, it was not only smugglers and pirates who became familiar with the peculiarities of these famous cliffs. Through a series of coincidences and discoveries Lyme Bay soon became known as one of the main areas for fossil hunting. Locked in the layers of shale and limestone known as the ‘blue lias’ were the secrets of a vast, ancient ocean now turned to stone, the first clue to an unknown world.

In 1792, war erupted in Europe and it became dangerous for the English gentry to travel on the Continent. Many of the well-to-do classes adopted the resorts of the south coast of England. The dramatic scenery around Lyme Bay became a favourite among those who spent part of the season at Bath. In the summer, smart carriages often lined the Parade and the steep, narrow streets that nestled into the hillside. The novelist Jane Austen was among those who visited early in the nineteenth century. She was charmed by the High Street, ‘almost hurrying into the sea’, and ‘the very beautiful line of cliffs stretching out to the east’. The Cobb curving around the harbour became the dramatic setting for scenes in her new novel Persuasion. It was here that Louisa Musgrove fell ‘lifeless … her eyes closed, her face like death’, and was nursed back to health by the romantic sea captain.

Jane Austen’s letters to her sister, Cassandra, reveal that during her short stay she met an artisan in the town by the name of Richard Anning. He was summoned to value the broken lid of a box and, according to Jane Austen, was a sharp dealer. She told her sister that Anning’s estimate, at five shillings, was ‘beyond the value of all the furniture in the room together’.

Richard Anning, even as a skilled carpenter, struggled to make a living. The blockade of European ports during the Napoleonic Wars had caused severe food shortages. With no European corn available, the price of wheat had risen sharply, from 43 shillings a quarter in 1792 just before the war, to 126 shillings in 1812. Since bread and cheese was the staple diet for many in the southern counties, the spiralling price of a loaf caused great suffering. Wages did not rise during this period, and in many districts workers received a supplement from the parish to enable them to buy bread. Industrious labourers effectively became paupers relying on parish charity, and there was a real fear of starvation. While the gentry, glimpsed beyond sweeping parklands in their country estates, benefited from high prices and seemed impervious to the effects of war, the poor began to riot. The flaming rick or barn became a symbol of the times. Richard Anning was himself a ringleader of one protest over food shortages.

In rural Dorset, the poor were not only hungry, but with a shortage of fuel they also faced damp, cold conditions and sometimes worse. Richard Anning and his wife, Molly, lived in a cottage in a curious array of houses built on a bridge over the mouth of the River Lym. On one occasion, they awoke to find that ‘the ground floor of their home had been washed away during the night’. Their modest home had succumbed to an ‘exceptionally rough sea which had worked the havoc’.

The desire to keep warm could have lain behind a tragedy that befell the Annings’ eldest child, Mary, at Christmas in 1798. The event was reported starkly in the Bath Chronicle: ‘A child, four years of age, of Mr R. Anning, a cabinet maker of Lyme, was left by the mother about five minutes … in a room where there were some shavings by a fire … The girl’s clothes caught fire and she was so dreadfully burnt as to cause her death.’ Whether Mary was huddling too close to the flames for warmth, or accidentally stumbled, is not known. It is known, however, that her distraught mother, on the birth of their next daughter six months later, called her Mary in memory of her dead sister.

Naming a newborn after a child that had died was a common practice at a time when a quarter of poor infants died in their first year and half were dead before the age of five. Many were undernourished and readily succumbed to consumption, pneumonia, smallpox, measles or other diseases. Apart from the sudden death of their eldest daughter Mary, the Annings had already lost two other children, Martha and Henry, by the year 1800. But fate was to intervene in an unexpected way in the young life of the second Mary Anning.

That summer, when Mary was just one year old, news reached Lyme Regis that a touring company of riders was to perform near the town. Among the enticements were a display of vaulting, riding stunts and a lottery, with prizes such as copper tea-kettles and legs of mutton. The arrival of the travelling performers was a welcome distraction for the local inhabitants, and crowds of people trekked past the church and the gaol near the Annings’ house to the equestrian show, set in a field on the outskirts of town. Mary was taken along in the care of a local nurse, Mrs Elizabeth Hasking.

By late afternoon a heavy thunderstorm developed, but the crowds would not disperse, perhaps lingering to see who had won the lottery. Then, in the words of the local schoolmaster, George Roberts: ‘a vivid discharge of electric fluid ensued, followed by the most awful clap of thunder that any present ever remembered hearing, which re-echoed around the fine cliffs of Lyme Bay. All appeared deafened by the crash. After a momentary pause a man gave the alarm by pointing to a group that lay motionless under a tree.’

There were three dead women, among them Mary’s nurse, Elizabeth, whose hair, arm and cap along the right side were ‘much burnt and the flesh wounded’. She was still holding the baby, who was insensible and could not be roused. The second Mary Anning, known to be ‘dear to her parents’, was carried back to Lyme, ‘in appearance dead’. But when bathed in hot water, gradually she was revived, to the ‘joyful exclamations of the assembled crowd’. According to the family, this was a turning-point for the young Mary Anning: ‘She had been a dull child before but after this accident she became lively and intelligent.’

As Mary grew older, she took a keen interest in helping her father gather fossil ‘curios’ from the beach to sell to tourists. In the early part of the century, Richard Anning had several more children to support: the boys Joseph, Henry, Percival and Richard and another daughter, Elizabeth. To supplement his meagre income as a carpenter, Mary and her father set up a curiosity table outside their home to sell their wares to the tourists. However, selling fossils was a competitive business.

One collector, called the ‘Curi-man’ or Captain Cury and known locally as a ‘confounded rogue’, would intercept the coaches and sell specimens to travellers on the Exeter to London turnpike. Another ill-fated collector was Mr Cruikshanks, who could often be seen along the shoreline with a long pole like a garden hoe. When Cruikshanks lost the small stipend supporting him, leaving nothing but a tiny income from the sale of curios, he closed the account of his miserable existence and committed suicide by leaping off the Gun-Cliff wall in the centre of Lyme into the sea.

No one could explain what these ‘curios’ were. Petrified in the rocks on the shore were strange shapes, like fragments of the backbone of a giant, unknown creature. These were sold locally as ‘verteberries’. There were enormous pointed teeth, thought to be derived from alligators or crocodiles. Relics of ‘crocodilian snouts’ had been reported in the region for several years. There were also pretty fossil shells and stones, called ‘John Dory’s bones’ or ‘ladies’ fingers’.

At the time, throughout England, superstitions abounded about the meaning of fossils. The beautiful ammonites, called ‘cornemonius’ in the local dialect, with their elegant whorls like the coils of a curled-up serpent, were also known as ‘snake-stones’. The subject of the wildest speculation, such stones were thought in earlier centuries to have magical powers, and could even serve as an oracle. The ammonite, it was believed, could bring ‘protection against serpents and be a cure for blindness, impotence and barrenness’. Occasionally a snake’s head would be painted on the coils to be used as a charm. But snake-stones were not always a symbol of good fortune. In some regions it was thought that they were originally people, who for their crimes were first turned into snakes and then cast into stone. By divine retribution anyone who was evil could be turned to dust, just as Lot’s wife had been turned into a pillar of salt.

There were other strange curios, too, such as the long, pointed belemnites. These were said to be thunderbolts used by God, known colloquially as ‘devil’s fingers’ or ‘St Peter’s fingers’. These also had special powers. According to ancient tradition powdered belemnites could cure infections in horses’ eyes, and water in which belemnites had been dipped was even thought to cure horses of worms.

The fossils that resembled fragments of real creatures like snakes or crocodiles defied explanation. Myths of the time give tantalising insights. Some held that they were the ‘seed’ or ‘spirit’ of an animal, spontaneously generated deep within the earth, which would then grow in the stone. According to others, fossils were God’s interior ‘ornament’ of the earth, just as flowers were the exterior ornament. They might even have been planted by God as a test of faith! After all, if they were the remains of real animals that had once thrived, how had they burrowed their way down so deep into the rocks? And why would any creature do this? Alternatively, if the rocks had formed gradually around them, long after the animals had perished, this implied that God’s Creation had occurred over a period of time, not in a few days as described in Genesis. Entombed in the stony cliff-face was a mystery beyond explanation.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century many had absolute faith in the word of the Bible. To them, the most convincing explanation was that these were the remains of creatures that had died during Noah’s Flood and had been buried as the earth’s crust re-formed. Although there are no records of Mary Anning’s view as a child, it seems likely that this was the framework of colourful folklore and unyielding religious belief that informed her searches along the cliffs of Lyme Bay.

Mary became skilled at searching for ‘crocodiles’. Laid out on the table before their house were giant bones of ‘Crocodiles’, ‘Angels’ Wings’, ‘Cupid’s Wings’, ‘Verteberries’, and ‘Cornemonius’. Her searches on the beach made her mother Molly Anning very angry, as, according to Roberts the schoolmaster, ‘she considered the pursuit utterly ridiculous’. It was also dangerous. Rainwater endlessly percolating through layers of soft shales and clays caused frequent mudslides and rockfalls, especially in winter. There was also the risk of being caught by the sea as the fossils, revealed by erosion, had to be removed before the tide turned and the waves washed them away. Sometimes Mary and her father were trapped by the rising waves between the sea and the cliffs, and had to struggle up the slippery rockface to safety. On one occasion, Richard Anning was caught in a landslide as part of the Church Cliffs collapsed into the sea, and narrowly escaped being carried down with the rocks and crushed on the beach below.

One night in 1810, however, Anning was not so lucky when, taking a short cut to Charmouth, he strayed from the path and fell over the treacherous cliffs at Black Ven. He was severely weakened by his injuries and soon succumbed to the endemic consumption and died. Molly and the children were destitute. They had no savings; indeed, Richard Anning had left his family with £120 worth of debt, a large sum at a time when the average labourer’s wage was around 10 shillings a week. There was no way that Molly could readily pay back such a debt. As a result, she was obliged to face the humiliating prospect of appealing for help from the Overseers of the Parish Poor. It was a considerable misfortune for an artisan family.

Under the old Poor Laws dating from Tudor times, the poverty-stricken could be accommodated in one of fifteen thousand Poor Houses in England, where inmates struggled with conditions recognisable from the pages of Charles Dickens. Alternatively the poor received ‘outdoor poor relief’, as in the case of the Annings, which enabled them to stay in their own home while receiving a supplement from the parish. Although conditions on outdoor relief varied across districts, it was usually a miserly amount for food and clothing, or sometimes given in kind as bread and potatoes. The average weekly payment on outdoor poor relief was three shillings at a time when the minimum needed to scrape a living was six or seven shillings a week. Paupers were thus dependent on charity or could appeal to relatives for support. Older children were expected to help out with any number of tasks – horse holding, running as messengers, and cleaning or other domestic work. It was common for those on poor relief to be severely malnourished, and the hardships the Anning family endured were so severe that of all the children, only Mary and Joseph were to survive.

While Joseph, Mary’s elder brother, was apprenticed to an upholsterer, Mary continued to search the beach for fossils. One day she found a beautiful ammonite, or snake-stone. As she carried her trophy from the beach a lady in the street offered to buy it for half a crown. For Mary this was wealth indeed, enough to buy some bread, meat and possibly tea and sugar for a week. From that moment she ‘fully determined to go down upon the beach again’.

During 1811 – the exact date is not known – Joseph made a remarkable discovery while he was walking along the beach. Buried in the shore below Black Ven, a strange shape caught his eye. As he unearthed the sand and shale, the giant head of a fossilised creature slowly appeared, four feet long, the jaws filled with sharp interlocking teeth, the eye sockets huge like saucers. On one side of the head the bony eye was entire, staring out at him from some unknown past. The other eye was damaged, deeply embedded in the broken bones of the skull. Joseph immediately hired the help of two men to assist him and uncovered what was thought to be the head of a very large crocodile.

Joseph showed Mary where he had found the enormous skull, but since that section of the beach was covered by a mudslide for many months afterwards it was difficult to look for more relics of the creature. Nearly a year elapsed before Mary, who was still scarcely more than twelve or thirteen, came across a fragment of fossil buried nearly two feet deep on the shore, a short distance from where Joseph had found the head.

Working with her hammer around the rock, she found large vertebrae, up to three inches wide. As she uncovered more, it was possible to glimpse ribs buried in the limestone, several still connected to the vertebrae. She gathered some men to help her extract the fossils from the shore. Gradually, they revealed an entire backbone, made up of sixty vertebrae. On one side, the shape of the skeleton could be clearly seen; it was not unlike a huge fish with a long tail. On the other side, the ribs were ‘forced down upon the vertebrae and squeezed into a mass’ so that the shape was harder to discern. As the fantastic creature emerged from its ancient tomb they could see this had been a giant animal, up to seventeen feet long.

News spread fast through the town that Mary Anning had made a tremendous discovery: an entire connected skeleton. The local lord of the manor, Henry Hoste Henley, bought it from her for £23: enough to feed the family for well over six months.

The strange creature was first publicly displayed in Bullock’s Museum in Piccadilly in the heart of London. It quite baffled the scholars who came to visit, as there was no scientific context in England within which they could readily make sense of the giant fossil bones. Geology was in its infancy and palaeontology did not exist. The peculiar ‘crocodile’, with its jaw set in a disconcerting smile and its enormous bony eyes, was something inexplicable from the primeval world. In the words of a report in Charles Dickens’s journal, All the Year Round, there was to be a ‘ten year siege before the monster finally surrendered’ and revealed its long-buried secrets to the gentlemen of science. Nearly a decade was to elapse before the experts could even agree on a name for the ancient creature.

As news of Mary Anning’s discovery reached scholarly circles in London and beyond, one of the first to visit her at Lyme Regis was William Buckland, a Fellow of the prestigious Corpus Christi College at Oxford University. Engravings of William Buckland portray a serious man, with even features and a broad expanse of forehead. Invariably, in these period poses, he is holding some fossil and formally attired in sombre black academic robes, looking the epitome of the nineteenth-century scientist. To those who knew him, he was renowned for qualities other than this stern and imposing image.

‘Dr Buckland’s wonderful conversational powers were as incommunicable as the bouquet of a bottle of champagne,’ wrote Storey Maskelyne, one of his Oxford colleagues. ‘It was at the feast of reason and the flow of social and intellectual intercourse that Buckland shone. A merrier man within the limit of becoming mirth I never spent an hour’s talk withal. Nothing came amiss with him from the creation of the world, to the latest news in town … In build, look and manner he was a thorough English gentleman, and was appreciated within every circle.’

Although Buckland had a wide range of interests his greatest passion was for ‘undergroundology’, as he called the new subject of geology. Many of his holidays from Oxford were spent at Lyme, where he explored the cliffs ‘with that geological celebrity, Mary Anning, in whose company he was to be seen wading up to his knees in the sea, searching for fossils in the blue lias’. At his lodgings by the sea, Buckland’s breakfast table was ‘loaded with beefsteaks and Belemnites, tea and Terebratula, muffins and Madrepores, toast and Trilobites, every table and chair as well as the floor occupied with fossils and rocks, earth, clays and heaps of books, his breakfast hour being the only time that the collectors could be sure of finding him, to bring their contributions and receive their pay’.

Born in the village of Axminster six miles inland from the Dorset coast, Buckland was no stranger to the impressive cliffs at Lyme. Since his childhood, the rocks of this region had enchanted him. ‘They were my geological school,’ he wrote, ‘they stared me in the face, they wooed me and caressed me, saying at every turn, Pray, Pray, be a geologist!’ His father, the Reverend Charles Buckland, had encouraged his enquiring approach to natural history. Following an accident, Charles Buckland was blind for the last twenty years of his life, but together father and son had explored the local quarries, the young William describing every detail of the beautiful fossil shells that his father could only touch. The boy’s exceptional ‘talent and industry’ were noted by his uncle, a Fellow at Oxford University, who steered William’s education, first to Winchester and then on to Corpus Christi College.

When William Buckland descended from his carriage in the city of famous spires at the turn of the nineteenth century, he had soon found that the university was steeped in an Anglican tradition in which the Scriptures, for many, were the key to understanding our history, and fossils were interpreted in this context. Most of the college lecturers took Holy Orders and advancement was principally through the Anglican Church. Buckland was himself ordained in 1809 and elected a Fellow in the same year.

At the time, more than a hundred years before radiometric dating was to dispel any lingering doubts about the vast antiquity of the globe, it was impossible to prove with certainty its exact age. For over two centuries, leading scholars had tried to solve this puzzle by taking the Bible as evidence. Studies of the earth were carried out by classicists, who could analyse sacred writings in Hebrew, Latin or Greek. In 1650 the Archbishop of Armagh, James Ussher, had concluded that God created the earth the night preceding Sunday 23 October, 4,004 years before the birth of Christ. His calculation had been made by adding together the life spans of the descendants of Adam, combined with knowledge of the Hebrew calendar and other biblical records. His dating of the earth, far from being ridiculed, was accepted as an excellent piece of historical scholarship, and following his lead, the study of chronology using sacred texts became an established approach for the next two hundred years.

Other methods of dating the earth were occasionally put forward. In 1715, Edmond Halley had proposed an ingenious experiment to the Royal Society in which the rate of increase in the saltiness of lakes and oceans could be calculated, assuming that they contained no salt when the globe was created. However, his ideas were not pursued, and Halley himself thought his results were likely to confirm ‘the evidence of the Sacred Writ, [that] Mankind has dwelt about 6,000 Years’.

Apart from revealing the age of the earth, the Bible had other geological implications that were to prove equally challenging for the early geologists like William Buckland. The prophet Moses outlined the story of Creation in which God made the Heavens, the Earth and every living thing in just seven days. In the biblical Creation story all creatures were made simultaneously. There is no prehistory in the Bible, and no prehistoric animals.

Moses also described a universal Flood in which ‘all the fountains of the great deep and the windows of heaven were opened’, and the entire face of the earth was wiped out, destroying all creatures except the few saved in Noah’s Ark. Sacred texts were scrutinised so as to shed more light on these events. One highly respected seventeenth-century naturalist, a German Jesuit, Athanasius Kircher, produced a detailed paper on the dimensions of the Ark and its animal contents. This approach was still flourishing in 1815, when the Reverend Stephen Weston studied changing place-names in Hebrew and Greek and claimed to locate the very site where Noah’s Ark came to land – on one of the highest mountains of the earth in Tibet.

At Oxford, William Buckland knew that anomalies unearthed in the rocks during the eighteenth century had challenged religious scholarship. Many stones resembling creatures or plants had been uncovered in locations that defied explanation. How could it be that sea shells were found on the peaks of the highest mountains? Was this evidence for the Flood and, if so, how had such vast amounts of water been suddenly generated and then fallen away? Savants were hard-pressed to explain why stones that looked just like animal teeth were found deeply embedded in solid rock, or how plants had become petrified within layers of coal. If fossils were the remains of animals, why were bones of tropical animals found in cold northern regions? Had the climate been mysteriously inverted? Stranger still, why was it that fossils resembling fish buried in one rock could be covered by layers of rock that contained only land animals, and in turn have shells and sea plants in the rocks above? This seemed to provide evidence of astonishing disorder and devastation, which was hard to understand if the world was purposefully designed in seven days by the Almighty Creator.

By the late eighteenth century scholars were making progress in understanding the history of the earth, not by taking the Bible as evidence, but the rocks themselves. One of the spurs for this was the growth of the mining industry in parts of Northern Europe such as Thuringia and Saxony. It was here on the present border between Germany and Poland that a pioneering thinker, Abraham Werner, created an order out of the seemingly haphazard formation of rocks beneath the earth’s surface.

Abraham Werner was taken out of school at Bunzlau when his mother died, and sent to work for his father who managed the local ironworks for the Duke of Solm. He later entered the great Mining Academy of Freiberg, where his teaching on mineralogy became famous throughout Europe. Werner’s ideas and others’ showed that the earth’s crust could be classified into four distinct categories of rock, which were always found to be in the same order of succession. The oldest of these were the crystalline rocks such as granite, gneiss and schist, containing no fossils. These became known as the Primary rocks, corresponding to the most primitive period of the earth’s history, since these rocks were laid down first in the earth’s crust. Above these in order of succession were the Transition rocks, including greywackes, slates and limestone. Only a small number of fossils could be found here. This was followed by the Secondary period, with highly stratified rocks, sandstones, limestones, gypsum and many other layers, filled with fossils. Finally, the most recent were the generally unconsolidated deposits of gravels, sand and clays, corresponding to the Tertiary period.

Rather than accepting that the earth’s crust had formed in a mere six thousand years, Abraham Werner speculated that the older Primary and Transition rocks had formed more than a million years ago, by precipitation from a universal ocean that once enveloped the whole world. His theory implied that the order of rocks he had identified in Saxony would be found elsewhere. If his observations were right, the consequences of his findings were huge, as they were proof that locked within the earth’s crust was evidence of distinct periods in its formation. By identifying an order in the layers of rock, Werner was offering the world a glimpse of prehistory.

Even more perplexing amid the lecture-rooms of deans and bishops at Oxford was a new theory put forward by a Scotsman, James Hutton. He did not accept Werner’s view that the older rocks had precipitated from a universal ocean, but envisaged that they were formed gradually by erosion and deposition. This led him to speculate that the history of the earth was so vast it was almost immeasurable.

From his observations Hutton inferred that the earth was caught in an endless cycle of forming and re-forming the landscape: cycles in which rivers carried sediment from the land to the sea; layers of sediment gently accumulated and compacted into stone on the sea floor, until earth movements lifted the layers out of the sea, folding the different strata to form a new landscape. Since, he reasoned, the erosion of land and the accumulation of sediment take millions of years, the only conclusion was that the landscape had formed over millennia. In his book, Theory of the Earth, he wrote of the earth’s history, ‘there is no vestige of a beginning and no prospect of an end’.

The ideas of Hutton, Werner and others opened the door to an unfamiliar landscape as well as a vast, unknown history of the earth. This abyss of geological time was almost as strangely unbelievable as the vastness of stellar space opened up by Copernicus in astronomy two centuries earlier. The new theories questioned the long-established chronology for the earth’s age of Archbishop Ussher, and with it, the authority of the Bible. Many thinkers felt that this was a dangerous pursuit. Richard Kirwan, President of the Royal Academy in Ireland, was one of several leading thinkers to ridicule Hutton’s claims, pointing out that this was ‘fatal’ to the account in Moses and therefore a threat to morality. Hutton’s theory was so obviously flawed that Kirwan had found it quite unnecessary to even read it!

William Buckland, brought up in the heart of the Anglican establishment but drawn to a rigorous, scientific approach to gathering evidence, was eager to understand the true history of the globe within which fossils could be correctly understood. Wishing to reconcile the two seemingly opposing sides of his nature, he dedicated himself to proving that religion and science did not stand opposed to each other, but were complementary. For him, geology was a ‘master science’ through which he could investigate the signature of God.

In 1813, when Buckland was appointed Reader in Mineralogy at Oxford, such was his enthusiasm to make sense of the apparently conflicting opinions about the earth’s history that he embarked on a detailed study of all the rocks of England, travelling with his friend, George Bellas Greenough. Greenough had helped to found the Geological Society of London in 1807. This began as a ‘little talking Geological Dinner Club’ in a central London tavern, and had rapidly blossomed into a scientific society which aimed to ‘make geologists acquainted with each other, stimulate their zeal … and contribute to the advance of Geological Science’.

Touring with Greenough, Buckland aimed to construct a geological map for the Society of all the strata they could identify, showing the different layers of rock in each region and comparing the fossils within them. Would the layers of rock in England correspond to those in the European rocks? What did the different formations reveal about prehistory?

With infectious enthusiasm, Buckland also enlisted the support of his long-standing friend, the intellectual Reverend William Conybeare, who had graduated from Oxford just before Buckland, taking a first in classics at Christ Church with effortless ease. The unconventional party also called upon ‘the zealous interest of some ladies of high culture at Penrice Castle, Lady Mary Cole and the Misses Talbots’, and any other like-minded individuals they met along the way. Buckland’s energetic and novel approach, which would not be constrained by centuries of Oxford tradition, was viewed with more than a little suspicion.

Whereas most gentlemen’s travelling carriages would have been of a certain standard, with an elegantly appointed interior matched, perhaps, by a smartly painted exterior and with discreet uniformed staff in attendance, William Buckland’s carriage provided a very different travelling experience. The sturdy frame was specially strengthened to allow for heavy loads of rocks; the front was fitted with a furnace and implements for assays and analysis of the mineral content of the stone; and there was scarcely room to sit amid the curiosities and fossils heaped into every available space.

Gossip abounded, too, about Buckland’s other little eccentricities. It was the custom for early geologists to carry out their fieldwork in the full splendour of a gentleman’s suit, with academic robes and even a top-hat. When travelling in the mail, Buckland was not beyond dropping his hat and handkerchief in the road to stop the coach if he spotted an interesting rock. On one occasion he happened to fall asleep on the top of the coach. An old woman, eyeing his bulging pockets with growing interest, eventually couldn’t resist emptying them, only to find to her astonishment that the gentleman, for all his finery, had pockets full of nothing but stones.

Sometimes Buckland rode a favourite old black mare, usually burdened with heavy bags and hammers. It was said that the mare was so accustomed to her master’s ways that even if a stranger was riding her, she would stop at every quarry and nothing would persuade her to advance until her rider had dismounted and pretended to examine the surrounding stones. Buckland became so expert on the rocks of England that his ‘geological nose’ could even tell him his precise locality. Once, when riding to London with a colleague on a very dark night, they lost their way. To his friend’s astonishment Buckland dismounted and, grabbing a handful of soil, smelled it and declared, ‘Ah Uxbridge!’

William Conybeare, it seems, was as zealous in his search for fossils as Buckland, and their activities never failed to attract attention. Once on a tour together they entered an inn after a particularly long, wet day on the cliffs, covered in mud and dirt. The two deans had fossil bags filled to bursting and proceeded to empty out the contents. The old woman serving their meal was said to be ‘much puzzled to make out the Deans’ real character’. After eyeing her ravenous customers suspiciously, she exclaimed, ‘Well I never. Fancy two real gentlemen picking up stones! What won’t men do for money!’

In trying to create a map showing the order of succession of the rock strata of England, Buckland and his friends were greatly influenced by the pioneering work of a surveyor called William Smith. A man of humble birth, Smith lived at the height of the ‘Canal Age’ in the late eighteenth century, when the fields of England were criss-crossed by a network of over two thousand miles of inland waterways. As he surveyed the land for canal building, he had become very familiar with the sequential order of British rock from the chalk down to the coal. He noticed that different strata contained different fossils and that this could be used to help identify some of the layers. Such was his enthusiasm to understand the order of strata that Smith devoted his modest income to travelling all over England. Versions of his geological tables had been on display since the 1790s, and he published his great map A Delineation of the Strata of England and Wales in 1815.

Unfortunately for Smith, George Bellas Greenough, the first President of the Geological Society, had little time for him and his map. When he saw Smith’s tables he was condescending and patronising and yet, it has been argued, with ‘barefaced piracy’ he was able to draw heavily on this work for the benefit of the Society. Undoubtedly Smith’s studies laid the groundwork for Buckland, who between 1814 and 1821 produced no less than eight different charts of the ‘Order of super-imposition of strata in the British Islands’.

All of this made little impression on the canons and bishops at Oxford. Scholars and religious leaders were alarmed that the sacred evidence of the word of God should be muddied with bits of rock and dirt. ‘Was ever the Word of God, laid so deplorably prostrate at the feet of an infant and precocious science!’ exclaimed George Bugg, author of Scriptural Geology. ‘We want no better guide than Moses,’ wrote George Cumberland to the editor of the popular Monthly Magazine in 1815. ‘If the object of geology be to attain the age of the earth as a planet, it seems an idle proceeding; first because if attained, it would apparently be useless … it can never be attained by the present mode of enquiry; and like the riddle of the Sphinx, would destroy the life of those who failed in solving it, by wearing out the only valuable property they have, viz, their intellects!’

For years, dons wielding authority through their sermons and sacred texts had successfully kept alternative schools of thought at bay. Among the more traditional scholars there was a real fear that geology would prove to be a ‘dangerous innovation’, and Buckland’s odd activities were watched ‘with an interest not wholly devoid of fear’. At the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1816, when Buckland took the opportunity to travel with Conybeare and Greenough across Europe, his departure was welcomed by some of the elderly classicists at Oxford. ‘Well Buckland has gone,’ announced one dean with satisfaction. ‘Thank God we will hear no more of this Geology!’ Nothing could have been further from the truth.

In 1816, Buckland published the first comparative table of the strata of England compared with those of the Continent. Similarities between the rocks of England and Europe were beginning to emerge. Greywacke slates, resembling the continental Transition formations, were found on the borders of England and Wales. Highly stratified layers of sandstone, limestone and conglomerates rich with fossils, like the Secondary formations of Europe, were widespread across England. Tertiary rocks, such as those around Paris, were identified in the London and Hampshire basins. Just as in Europe, these were always in the same order of succession, the oldest being Primary, then Transition, Secondary and Tertiary. As correlations were found between different regions, ‘marker’ rocks were identified. Chalk, for instance, was recognised as the upper limit of Secondary rock throughout Europe.

Buckland was keen to discover whether this order of succession extended worldwide. He wrote to several noblemen in command of Britain’s growing Empire, such as Lord Bathurst, the Secretary of the British Colonies, enclosing instructions for collecting geological specimens abroad. His appetite for information became insatiable: it was as if the layers of rock that enveloped the globe formed the pages of a history of the earth. But if this was so, what would be written on them? And how did all this fit with the extraordinary ‘crocodile’ found by Mary Anning?

The first clue to this puzzle lay in a remarkable new approach to interpreting fossils that was being pioneered in Paris by a French naturalist called Georges Cuvier. From a poor but bourgeois family, Cuvier had survived the French Revolution in Normandy, far from the troubles of Paris, where in his letters he had feigned support for the regime for fear of the French police. Once the Reign of Terror had released its grip on Paris and the city became safe again, Cuvier went to the capital and soon secured a post at the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle. With his striking crop of red hair, bright-blue eyes and somewhat unkempt appearance, it wasn’t long before the ambitious young naturalist had made an impression.

As Napoleon’s army swept across Europe, spoils from museums and private collections were frequently sent back to Paris. Fossils were also retrieved from the plaster quarries around Paris, and during the course of building canals around the city. The new Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, established by the Republicans in place of the Jardin du Roi, rapidly became the envy of the world. Cuvier began to apply his extensive knowledge of the anatomy of living creatures to try to interpret fossil skeletons with a view to understanding the ancient forms of life.

Georges Cuvier believed that fundamental laws must govern the anatomy of creatures as surely as the laws established by Newton now governed physics. If a creature was a carnivore, Cuvier observed, all of its organs would be designed for this purpose. The forelimbs would be strong enough to grasp prey; the hind-limbs muscular and mobile, for hunting; the teeth would be sharp, capable of ripping meat; the jaw would have sufficient muscular support for the animal to tear prey; and the digestive organs would be adapted for carnivorous food. In effect, Cuvier’s principle of ‘correlation of parts’ showed that all the organs and limbs of a creature are interdependent and must function together for that creature to survive. He rapidly acquired a brilliant reputation. From a single fossil bone, he declared, he could deduce the class of the beast – whether it was a mammal, reptile or bird – and ascertain subordinate divisions: the order, family, genus (plural: genera), and perhaps even the very species to which the fossil animal belonged.

‘Let us not search further for the mythological animals,’ said Cuvier. ‘The mantichore or destroyer of men which carries a human head on a lion’s body terminating in a scorpion’s tail, or the guardian of treasures, the Griffin, half eagle–half lion … Nature could not combine such impossible features.’ The teeth and jaws of a lion, for example, could only belong to a creature that possessed the other attributes of a powerful carnivore, a muscular frame and skeleton that would confer enormous strength. The Sphinx of Thebes, the Pegasus of Thessaly, the Minotaur of Crete, mermaids – those half-women half-fish that lured sailors to their death with the sweetness of their song – were all myths that crumbled under Cuvier’s scientific scrutiny. ‘These fantastic compositions may be recovered among ruins,’ he said, ‘but they certainly do not represent real beings.’ Instead, Georges Cuvier offered a real past, conjuring up a vivid picture of creatures that had once roamed the surface of the earth.

Less than two years after his arrival in Paris, in January 1796, the twenty-seven-year-old naturalist made his debut at the National Institute of Sciences and Arts. His talk ‘On the species of living and fossil elephants’ pointed to an astonishing conclusion.

Following French victories in Holland, a private collection of fossil ‘elephants’ at the Hague had been seized and sent to Paris. Cuvier had compared these fossils from Holland to the bones of present-day elephants from India and Africa. As he studied the characteristics of the teeth and jaw he realised that the fossil ‘elephant’ differed in the shape and proportions of the jaw from either of the two living species. On the basis of these differences, he argued, the fossil ‘elephant’ should be classified as a separate species. The distribution of the fossil bones also differed; unlike the Indian or African elephant, the fossil species was never found in the tropics. He gave the fossil elephant a special name in recognition of its differences: the ‘mammoth’.

Since mammoths differed from any living elephants, reasoned Cuvier, this species was now extinct. The discovery, soon after this, of the first preserved mammoth in the permafrost of Siberia lent weight to his ideas. Cuvier believed the snowy wastes of Northern Europe and Siberia had once been inhabited by these enormous woolly beasts, which had somehow mysteriously perished. And he went on to show that other large fossil mammals, apart from the mammoth, had thrived on the ancient globe. He identified ‘Megatherium’, or ‘huge beast’, a creature resembling a giant sloth and covered in fur like a bear, which could stand on two legs to graze on leaves. An elephantine creature whose fossils combined the teeth of a hippopotamus with the huge tusks of a mammoth was named by Cuvier a ‘mastodon’.

Cuvier’s large extinct mammals, the mammoth, the mastodon and Megatherium, were found in the most recent, Tertiary deposits. In older strata Cuvier identified an ancient sea lizard, ‘Mosasaurus’ or ‘lizard of the Meuse’, and several extinct species of crocodile. His studies suggested that entire animal races had been wiped from the face of the earth. He was haunted by the desire to know what had happened to the vanished creatures. Why would God create these beings if He planned only to destroy them? Cuvier wanted to ascertain whether ‘species which existed then have been entirely destroyed, or if they have merely been modified in their form, or if they have simply been transported from one climate into another’. Quite why and how extinction occurred was a puzzle that remained to be solved.

William Buckland was impressed by Cuvier’s discoveries and eager to learn from his approach, comparing fossil animals to living creatures so as to work out their zoological affinities. He discussed Mary Anning’s unknown creature with his friend the Reverend Conybeare, who wanted to make a definitive scientific study of the giant beast. Mary’s ‘crocodile’ possessed such a puzzling blend of characteristics that it was hard to classify. The long, pointed snout was similar to a dolphin’s or porpoise’s. The teeth were more like those of a crocodile, with sharp, conical fangs, each one ridged all around the enamel. The vertebrae were slender, like the backbone of a fish. It was baffling.

To compound their problems, England did not have a centre of anatomical excellence comparable to the magnificent collections under Cuvier’s supervision in Paris. Consequently, Buckland tried to establish a correspondence with Cuvier, ‘founded on an exchange of fossil specimens’, and hoped to benefit from the French expertise.

It was to Lyme that the Reverends Buckland and Conybeare went in search of fossil ‘crocodiles’ as gifts for Cuvier, and in particular to the collection of Mary Anning.

Mary and her mother had established a ‘tiny, old curiosity shop close to the beach’. According to one visitor, ‘the most remarkable petrifactions and fossil remains … were exhibited in the window’. Inside, the little shop and adjoining chamber were ‘crammed with ammonites, heads of “crocodiles”, and boxes of shells’. To Mary’s skills as a collector, Buckland acknowledged, he felt greatly indebted, for she continued to supply more specimens of her unknown creature. Cuvier was interested to see the latest discoveries from England, and soon Buckland established a correspondence with a young assistant in Cuvier’s department, Joseph Pentland. Pentland acted as liaison between Cuvier and the English team, organising shipments of casts and providing information on fossils.

But while Buckland and his colleagues were approaching Georges Cuvier, another London gentleman, Sir Everard Home, raced into print with the first published account of Mary’s creature. Although Sir Everard relished his reputation as Britain’s leading anatomist and held the distinguished position of Surgeon to the King, he was in fact not only incompetent, but also a fraud. Much of his fame was due to reflected glory from John Hunter, his famous brother-in-law.

John Hunter was revered in England as the ‘father of modern surgery’ and had pioneered early studies of anatomy before his sudden death from a heart attack. Sir Everard was secretly plagiarising Hunter’s unpublished manuscripts. He had removed ‘a cartload’ of Hunter’s anatomical papers from the Royal College of Surgeons in London. Once he had copied them out in his own name, he allegedly burned Hunter’s originals. Such was his enthusiasm to demolish the evidence, on one occasion Sir Everard set fire to his own hearth and had to call out the fire brigade.

In his first paper to the Royal Society in 1814, Sir Everard initially favoured the idea that Mary Anning’s creature was some kind of crocodile. This was because he had noticed small germs of conical teeth contained within the larger teeth. Whereas mammals have just two sets of teeth, the milk teeth and the adult teeth, reptiles have replacement teeth growing through the jaw all their lives. But when Sir Everard split one of the teeth open, he mistook the young germ tooth inside for an accumulation of calcareous minerals. ‘The characteristic mark therefore, of a crocodile’s teeth,’ he wrote, ‘was thus removed.’ He wrongly concluded that it was not a reptile.

Then he reasoned that it must be an enormous aquatic bird, since the pattern of openings in the skull of the creature was similar to that of birds. The bones of the eye, he wrote, ‘subdivided into thirteen plates, which is only met in birds’. But if it was a bird, where were the wings, and why so many fish-like characteristics? Sir Everard considered that the lower jaw of the skull ‘admits the mouth to be opened to a great extent … resembling the voracious fishes’. New specimens revealed the ‘bird’ had paddles for swimming, and he decided the creature belonged to the class of fishes; although, somewhat baffled, he wrote, ‘I by no means consider it wholly a fish.’

After his initial uncertainty over whether the beast should be classed as reptile, bird or fish, by 1819 Sir Everard thought he had solved the puzzle. A new creature called a ‘Proteus’ had just been described in English by a Viennese physician. This was a blind, amphibious, serpentine creature with very unusual anatomical features that inhabited caves. Mistakenly guessing that the Lyme ‘crocodile’ was a link between the Proteus and lizards, he named it ‘Proteosaurus’, or ‘Proteus-lizard’. However, the year before, Mary Anning’s creature had been sold to the British Museum, where the Keeper of Natural History, Charles Konig, had named her animal ‘Ichthyosaurus’, meaning ‘fish-lizard’. This was in recognition of its curious mixture of fish and reptile characteristics. Since this name had been put forward first, it had priority over any other. Sir Everard Home was furious, and he continued to promote his own rival name, ‘Proteosaurus’.

In all this confusion, one thing was clear: the French were laughing at the English grasp of anatomy. Joseph Pentland, in Cuvier’s laboratory, scoffed at the papers of the ‘London Baronet’, as he called Sir Everard. He wrote to William Buckland in Oxford saying that Sir Everard’s ‘ridiculous’ papers were ‘abstruse, incomprehensible and for the most part, uninteresting’. What is more, the London Baronet was ‘crowding’ the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, the prestigious journal of the oldest scientific society of Europe, blocking the publications of others whose work was more ‘worthy and honourable’.

Possibly because Sir Everard dominated the Royal Society, Buckland’s friends, the Reverend Conybeare and another enthusiastic young geologist, Henry de la Beche, prepared their detailed scientific paper on Mary’s creature for the Geological Society. They gathered many more specimens from Lyme and the Bristol area and were also able to capitalise on the anatomical expertise of the French. ‘I am sure that the fossil approaches much nearer to the family of Saurians [lizards],’ wrote Pentland to Buckland in 1820. ‘The dentition of the Ichthyosaurus is the same as in lizards.’

Conybeare and de la Beche published their findings in 1821. In agreement with the French, they showed that the teeth of the animal bore more resemblance to those of a crocodile than to any other creature. The replacement cycle of teeth so characteristic of a reptile, with ‘the young tooth growing up in the interior cavity of the old one,’ wrote Conybeare, ‘is exactly similar’. The bones of the skull were also lizard-like, with two openings at the back behind the eye, lightening the skull and allowing the muscles of the jaw to bulge so that it could work more efficiently. In the lower jaw alone, all the bones that Cuvier had identified in a crocodile could also be seen in this animal.

There were, however, some differences between Mary’s fossil and a crocodile skull. The teeth, Conybeare observed, ‘are more numerous than in the crocodile, there cannot be less than 30 a side’. The huge round eyes were larger in proportion to the skull than the eyes of any other known animal. Having no eyelids, to prevent injury in a rough sea, it had instead many thin, flexible bones encasing the pupil to protect it. The general shape of the jaw, he thought, ‘differs from the crocodile in being much more lengthened’, and ending in a point ‘almost as sharp as the beak of a bird’. Nonetheless, in both the dentition and the bone structure the animal ‘approaches more closely to the Saurian or Lizard family, and especially to the genus Crocodile,’ said Conybeare, ‘than to any other recent type’. The fossil beast, therefore, belonged to the reptile class and the saurian family.

Despite this, it had many characteristics of fishes. The vertebrae were just like those of a fish, with small, flat discs allowing enormous flexibility of the spine. The bones were also very light, combining the ‘greatest strength with least weight’, which would ‘increase the buoyancy of the animal and enable it to face the waves of an agitated ocean’. With eighty or ninety such vertebrae, the creature could reach twenty-four feet in length. In view of its fish and lizard affinities Conybeare accepted the name Ichthyosaurus, or ‘fish-lizard’, to denote the genus. While tactfully acknowledging the ‘praise worthy readiness’ with which Sir Everard had communicated his ideas ‘instantly to the public’, his ‘Proteosaurus’ was quietly forgotten. Ichthyosaurus, said Conybeare, roamed the primitive seas ‘upon which no human eye ever rested’. He tried to trace the boundaries of this long-buried sea by seeing how far the fossil remains extended across England. They found ichthyosaurs in many counties in South-west England deposited within the Secondary strata.

As Conybeare and de la Beche searched the Secondary rocks, they came upon other bones, principally vertebrae, which did not quite match those of Ichthyosaurus or of a crocodile. ‘I was persuaded that they had all belonged to different places in the vertebral column of a single species,’ wrote Conybeare. He began to suspect that another unknown sea lizard had shared the ancient ocean with the ichthyosaurs. He proposed the name ‘Enalo-sauri’, or ‘sea lizards’, to denote the whole order, and hinted strongly that more types of these giant sea creatures had yet to be uncovered. The paper was seen as a triumph, and their description of the ichthyosaurs stands to this day.

As for Mary Anning, she hadn’t the education or the position in the world to name her finds or to use them as an entrée to the male-dominated world of science. She was not even named in the scholarly papers on her creature published in London. In her cottage by the sea or sitting on the shore at Lyme, she painstakingly copied out the learned articles in her own hand, making drawings and trying to grasp the language of the new science. There is even a suggestion that she may have tried to learn French in order to read Cuvier for herself. With many French visitors to the port of Lyme, this was not such an impossible feat.

Mary was sufficiently encouraged by her first discovery to persevere in her daily searches on the shore, braving all weathers. The deplorable conditions of five years’ parish relief focused her efforts tremendously as, according to one collector, Thomas Hawkins, she ‘explored the frowning and precipitous cliffs, when the furious spring-tide conspired with the howling tempest to overthrow them, and rescued [fossils] from the gaping ocean, sometimes at the peril of her life’. The dangers Mary faced were also noted by a gentleman’s daughter, Anna Maria Pinney, who sometimes explored the cliffs with her: ‘we climbed down places, which I would have thought impossible to have descended had I been alone. The wind was high, the ground slippery, and the waves beating against Church Cliff. When we had clambered to the bottom our dangers were by no means over … In one place she had to make haste to pass between the dashing of two waves … she caught me with one arm round the waist and carried me some distance.’

As news of Mary Anning’s finds spread among the members of the Geological Society several gentlemen, as well as William Buckland, sought her out at Lyme. She was cultivated by Henry de la Beche, who was studying the Ichthyosaurus with Reverend Conybeare. De la Beche was a young man of independent means who had inherited from his father an estate in Jamaica, which had prospered with the slavery trade. A Lieutenant-Colonel Thomas Birch also took a keen interest in gathering fossil evidence of the Ichthyosaurus, and acquired many of her specimens. Anna Pinney noted that Mary was ‘courted by those above her’, and she rapidly acquired ‘many ideas and a power of communicating them’. In spending time with such gentlemen from a very different class, she had already stepped aside from her peasant background. ‘She frankly owns,’ admitted Anna, ‘that the society of her own rank is become distasteful to her.’ Despite this, she continued to ‘attend the sick poor night and day, even when they are ill with infectious diseases’. Whether Mary dared to hope that one day she might escape hardships of her upbringing through marriage is not recorded.

She became a familiar figure on the shoreline, variously portrayed in her long skirts and shawl, clogs, poke-bonnet or hat, a lone figure endlessly toiling at her mysterious task against vast skies and shifting tides. Such was her dedication, Anna Pinney wrote, that she continued ‘to support her mother and brother in bitter poverty even when she was so ill that she was brought … fainting from the beach’.

The layers of rock that so fascinated Mary Anning held the secrets of prehistory. Locked behind the impenetrable dark face of Black Ven and the cliffs beyond were the clues to an ancient ocean, whose boundaries were yet unknown. From her discussions with the gentlemen geologists, Mary knew that another kind of sea lizard was almost certainly buried there, waiting to be uncovered.