In December 1839, Mary Buckland drew the great landslip near Lyme Regis. It was engraved on zinc by George Scharf and printed as a hand-tinted lithograph by Charles Joseph Hullmandel, who studied chemistry under Michael Faraday. (Reproduced by permission of the Geological Society of London)

      The distraught parents named their next baby girl Mary in memory of their lost child – and this little girl was destined to become the greatest of all the pioneer fossil hunters. Of the remaining children, only one other, a son named Joseph, survived to adulthood. Infant mortality through this period was around 50 per cent, so the loss of so many infants would not have been regarded as particularly unusual. People at that time lived so close to tragedy. Death was simply a shade of daily life.27

      The rocky strata near Lyme Regis are marked by numerous layers of Blue Lias, a rock rich in mudstone that was originally the bed of a shallow sea. This form of rock is widely spread across southern England and South Wales and was laid down in late Triassic and early Jurassic times between 195 and 200 million years ago; it is also known as Lower Lias. The muddy seabed was littered with ammonite shells, and the remains of sea creatures – fish and swimming reptiles – are also abundant. Both youngsters accompanied their parents scouring the rocky shelves exposed after a storm, and they quickly became adept at finding fossils. Then, in 1810, their father Richard Anning suddenly died, and the family was left in penury. Their only possible source of income was now fossil hunting, and the children went out with their mother each day, looking for fossils to sell as souvenirs to visitors. They sold, as they do today, for a present-day value of about £10 ($12). When he was 15, young Joseph discovered part of a remarkably well-preserved ichthyosaur in a rocky shelf and showed his sister where it lay. A year later it was more fully exposed, and Mary had the skill to extricate it from the shore. The skeleton was well preserved, though at the time they could find no skull. Those who saw it concluded that it was some sort of crocodile. Ever since John Walcott’s published descriptions in 1779, others had been finding similar specimens. The Blue Lias rock is visible along the coast of South Wales, and as a student I used to find fragments of ichthyosaur skeletons in the smooth strata that storms had exposed. At Welsh St. Donats in 1804, an enthusiast named Edward Donovan discovered an ichthyosaur specimen represented by its jaw, vertebræ, ribs and pectoral girdle. It would have measured 13 feet (4 metres) long and was adjudged to be a gigantic lizard. In the next year two more were found in the same strata on the opposite side of the Bristol Channel, one discovered at Weston by Jacob Wilkinson and the other by the Reverend Peter Hawker. This specimen soon became known as Hawker’s Crocodile. In 1810 an ichthyosaur jaw was dug out at Stratford-upon-Avon, but the locals simply put it with some bones from a fossilized plesiosaur to make up a specimen that was more marketable. The name ichthyosaur was becoming popular, derived from the Greek ιχθυς (ichthys, meaning fish) and σαυρος (sauros, lizard).

      By 1811 the time was ripe for a major discovery: in Lyme Regis, along what is now called the Jurassic Coast of Dorset, the first complete ichthyosaur skull was found by Joseph Anning, the brother of Mary, and she soon found the thoracic skeleton of the same animal. Their mother Molly sold the whole piece to Squire Henry Henley for £23 (now about £1,300 or $1,600) and it was later bought by the British Museum for twice the price. It remains on display at the Natural History Museum and is now identified as a specimen of Temnodontosaurus platyodon. Both the young Mary and her mother were now adept fossil hunters, while Joseph went on to train as a furniture upholsterer. It was the sight of the young Mary Anning that visitors found so unusual. She did not just collect, but she studied the remains that she found, transcribing lengthy accounts from learned texts and meticulously copying the illustrations of fossils they contained.

      By now, Buckland was regularly visiting Dorset to purchase fossils and collect his own specimens, and he became particularly intrigued by the ‘bezoar stones’ that Mary Anning had been discovering alongside her ichthyosaur skeletons. The bezoar was the name given to an indigestible mass found within human intestines; it was believed that a glass of poison containing a bezoar would be instantly rendered harmless. The word comes from the Persian pādzahr (پادزهر), meaning ‘antidote’. Anning discovered that, when those rounded, rough stones were broken open, they always contained the scales and bones of fish and smaller ichthyosaurs. In 1829, Buckland recognized that these stones were present everywhere that fossil reptiles were found, and he suddenly realized what they were. They were fossilized faeces. They really were masses from within the gut. Buckland decided to call them ‘coprolites’, the term we use to this day. He became devoted to the study of the fossils that Mary Anning had discovered, and his enthusiasms gave rise to an historic painting by Henry de la Beche entitled Duria Antiquior – a more Ancient Dorset, which portrayed some of the swimming reptiles Mary Anning had discovered, with some of Cuvier’s pterodactyls swooping across the heavens. At last it was becoming clear that there had been an age of strange reptiles that were frighteningly large and had bizarre lifestyles. The age of the dinosaur was steadily coming closer.

      A prominent British geologist, Sir Henry Thomas de la Beche, born in London in 1796, had moved to Lyme Regis where he befriended Mary Anning. He investigated fossil reptiles and wrote extensively on surveying rocky strata. De la Beche was