Customer Reviews

The Fossil Hunter: Dinosaurs, Evolution, and the Woman Whose Discoveries Changed the World (Macsci)

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

The main strength of this book is as a biography. There have been other books by people like Martin Rudwick (Worlds Before Adam) and Christopher McGowan (The Dragon Seekers) that have discussed some of Mary Anning's contributions to the historical development of paleontology and geology, but this book is a true biography that describes her life, both her inner life and her interactions with her community, which in her case was really two separate communities, the community of wealthy and well educated gentleman geologists with whom she worked, and the community of the poor working class people of Lyme Regis in which she and her family lived. The book does a particularly good job of describing how social and economic changes (and even natural disasters) in early 19th century Britain affected peoples lives in a place like Lyme Regis. It also inevitably touches on issues of gender and class in the scientific community of the early 19th century and English society in general. The author also attempts to put Anning's work into context with regard to the major intellectual developments in the fields of paleontology and geology during the first half of the 19th century and for the most part is successful in doing so. However, there are a few jarring discrepancies like when she implies that Charles Lyell never accepted evolution, when in fact by the 1860s he did, even if continued to doubt (as did Alfred Russel Wallace) that all aspects of the human mind could have been produced by a purely material process like natural selection, which is a big part of why I gave this book 4 stars instead of 5. This is a very readable book that will appeal to anyone with an interest in life in early 19th century England, the (rather interesting) history of the Lyme Regis resort community, the history of paleontology and geology, issues of class and gender in the history of science, or who just likes reading biographies of important figures in the history of science. Incidentally, I read this book on my Kindle, and the table of contents and footnote links worked very well.

I recently read Tracy Chevalier's newest book Remarkable Creatures, the story of Mary Anning, a woman I had never heard of but is getting the attention she so richly deserved. I enjoyed Remarkable Creatures so much I was very happy to learn of this biography of her life. For anyone who doesn't normally like nonfiction I would recommend this book, it is written in a very accessible style and the story is so astonishing it reads like fiction. Emling has written a book that I found easy to read and hard to put down.

Mary Anning was born in 1799 and lived in the Lyme Regis area of England her entire life; she learned to fossil hunt as a small child, at that time a fossil was anything dug out of the ground, most of Mary's fossils finds were ammonites. Living on the very edge of poverty and barely literate she became one of the most renowned paleontologists of her time. At the age of 11 she found the first entire fossil skeleton of an ichthyosaur; a fossil that is still on display in the Natural History Museum in London. This find was the first step in the eventual theory of evolution by Darwin, who used Mary's finds and works extensively in his Origin of the Species.

The fact that Mary found this one specimen would be pretty astonishing, but she also discovered the first complete plesiosaurus, the first pterosaur (pterodactyl), a new fossil fish (Squaloraja), along with many other smaller finds. With all this she is barely known today and was often overlooked or not credited during her lifetime - most likely because she was a woman and the scientific community at that time was male dominated. Although she had many well known friends in the geological world during her lifetime she was never accorded the accolades, respect or monetary earnings these men achieved. She died at the age of 48, from breast cancer, and is largely unknown today. Although most of us have recited the `She sells sea shells on the seashore' tongue twister how many of us knew it was written about this amazing woman? A very good read and one I would recommend to anyone wishing to learn about the first baby steps of understanding evolution.

The subject of this biography is what saves it. Mary Anning is a very interesting character and the author has done good research of her subject. Unfortunately the writing style is very lacking, there is way too much speculative language ("she might have...", "she would have...", etc.) The author's attempt at filling in the biography with historical information is to be lauded, but tends to a disjointed, unnatural flow of the book. She is also quite repetitive, especially when commenting on Mary not receiving due credit for her amazing finds. I did finish the book because of my interest in Mary Anning, but for people with similar interests I recommend looking for a different biographer. This author gets an "A" for research & effort, but fails as a writer.

I have to tell you that I was completely charmed by this offering from Shelly Emling. Having been a collector of fossils since early childhood you would think I would have heard of this remarkable woman but until my wife read a fictional account of Mary Anning's life a few years ago, I fear she simply had never appeared on my radar screen...what a pity. Having discussed the fictional work with her, i.e. my wife, I became curious and wanted to know more. The time period covered during Anning's life is of great interest to me...early Victorian England and between that and the fascination with fossils I have, well.....

First of all, this is a very well written work. The reader need to understand that the author is not a scientist, but rather a biographer. Those in search of scientific dissertations need to look elsewhere. No, this is the story of a woman from a different time, a different era but one that had a profound impact as to how we perceive the world around us to this day. Mary Anning was most certainly a woman before her time.

Mary Anning was born in Lyme Regis, England in 1799. Unknown to the world in general, things were about to change. Over a period of around 50to 60 years, science was finally taken from the complete church control, control it had had for years and years. Before this period, geology, biology, anatomy, medicine...and the list goes on, was pretty much dictated by the church and if it was not found in the scriptures, then it was either wrong or did not exists...literally! While Mary was herself an extremely religious and devout woman, her findings helped greatly in paving the way for that remarkable group of European scholars who turned the world around. In many ways Charles Darwin owed this woman a lot...he used many of her findings, incorporating them in his work.

This woman, extremely poor, of a very low social cast (her father was a carpenter), and very little formal education (probably two years of schooling at the most), was at the lead of a wave of new discoveries relating to life on earth over the past several million years. Her fossil finds were absolutely remarkable and her interpretation of the data she exposed was just as remarkable.

The author of course gives an account of Mary Anning's life, but that is only half of the story as to this biography. We are also given a glimpse of England during one of its most trying times...shortly after wars with Napoleon when through horrible taxation laws, the onset of the industrial revolution and an extremely rigid cast system made live absolutely miserable for many people, especially women of a lower social order. Folks, we are given a very nice social history here which is almost as fascinating as the subject herself.

The author, by her own admission, has used quite a lot of speculation in this work, in particular when she records what Mary "might" have been thinking or what her "probable" actions and emotions were in any given situation. At first, I will be honest with you; this was a bit annoying. That is until I thought about it for a while. What the author has done, either consciously or unconsciously, is treated Mary Anning like one of the wonderful fossils she, Anning, discovered herself. When a new fossil is found, there is much to speculate about. The finder has a limited amount of information available (a few bits of fossilized bone in most cases), but through educated "guessing," the scientist can take what is known, such as the era, climate, geographical location, etc. etc. and give a pretty good description of the creature in questions...maybe not 100 percent accurate, but pretty good never the less.

This is just what the author did with Anning. She had limited information but she took it, and through educated guesses; obviously knowing a lot about the early Victorian period and a lot about the women of that time, has given us a pretty good picture of what Mary was like, and indeed, how she thought. I ended up liking this tool and method the author used.

Mary died of breast cancer at a relatively early age in 1887. During her life time , despite being know by and rubbing elbows with some of the greatest scientists in Europe, she was never really given credit for the remarkable contribution she made to science...simply because she was a woman. How sad.

This is a pleasing read, filled with great information and is in fact quite inspirational. I do recommend this one highly.

Don Blankenship
The Ozarks

In 1999, the two hundredth birthday of Mary Anning, "the first woman geologist", was marked with a modest celebratory event in the small Philpot Museum in her home town, Lyme Regis, on England's southern shore. It led, eventually, to renewed interest in the life and time of this unique young woman, who despite being of the poorest background and without formal education, contributed in the most extraordinary way to the advancement of science and understanding of life on earth. Shelley Emling, researching Mary Anning's life, and basing herself on available contemporary sources, such as correspondence, notebooks and news items, as well as on a range of science research materials on the early days of geology and paleontology, has added an engaging and accessible biography to the mix of materials on Mary Anning and her work. Set against the emerging and often acrimonious scientific debates on the evolution of live, the literal veracity of the Bible - several decades prior to Charles Darwin's The Origin Of Species: 150th Anniversary Edition - the author also delves into the society's political life and social conditions and introduces other important public figures and scientists that were influenced by Mary Anning's finds and/or played an important role in her life.

Born in 1799, Mary had discovered (with her brother) and excavated the first complete ichthyosaur at the age of 12. Taught since early childhood by her enthusiastic amateur fossil hunting father, a cabinet maker, she developed an extraordinary skill not only in identifying the locations in the cliffs' rocks or mud formations where prehistoric fossils could be found, she taught herself the scientific bases she needed to identify and classify her finds. She cleaned, preserved and presented her finds with meticulous precision, produced high quality drawings, and over her lifetime, became an essential resource for "gentlemen geologists", and other collectors of fossils. The rich diversity of creatures that had lived in the region around Lyme Regis, in either land or water or both, millions of years ago raised many questions and challenged the religious beliefs of the time.

The first decades of the nineteenth century were also a time when women's contribution to science was unheard of and usually discounted. Women were not even viewed as having the kind of brain that could process and, even less, produce scientific thought and analysis. All evidence suggests, however, that Mary was an adventurous young girl and grew into a young woman who, eager to educate herself, was not afraid to speak her mind, even though this was not at all the norm for somebody from the lower classes. As her scientific knowledge increased, so did the depth of her conversations with the male scientists and, with it, grew her frustration with the treatment she received from the science community: there was no public recognition for her eminent contributions to the scientific discoveries and debates; fossils were identified by the buyer than the finder. Even those closest to her, like William Buckland and Henry de la Beche, whom she regarded as her friends and who had been buying and relying on her fossils, or assisted her in selling them to museums around the country and beyond, and, at times, otherwise supported her financially, did only fully recognize their indebtedness to her work publicly until after her death in 1847.

Given the scarcity of original sources that shed light on many aspects of Mary Anning's life, Emling's biography has to rely on creative imagination and conjecture, especially where she imagines Mary's thinking and views of her life and the role she played in the society of "gentlemen geologists" and other scientists. While the author is careful to distinguish between fact and speculation on her part, the extensive use of the conditional tense, often combined with "probable", "likely", etc. can become somewhat tedious to the reader. Nonetheless, the story is written in a flowing and easy-going storytelling style, bringing this biography closer to the two novels, written around the same time in 2009/10: Tracy Chevaliers' Remarkable Creatures: A Novel and Joan Thomas's Curiosity.

Having read both novels about Mary Anning first, I was curious to compare the fictionalization of her character with the biography of Emling. Without wanting to reveal parallels and differences, I must say, that Emling's biography is a good additional source for anybody interested in Mary Anning's role in paleontology, the society in which she lived and the important debates that swirled around science and religion at the time. It also lays to rest any curiosity the reader might have about any romance that Mary may have experienced... [Friederike Knabe]

I enjoyed the book thoroughly despite the fact that words are put in Mary's mouth, she is imagined to have done this, said that, she might have.....she most probably would have.....in all likelihood she......we can well imagine that she.... and so on. These imaginings take up quite a lot of space and were the real Mary Anning less interesting, less independent-minded, less passionate about fossils I would have closed the book in disappointment. But I didn't. I really loved the history decade by decade and sometimes year by year--the horrific storm that Emling tells us is still talked about almost 200 years later. The famous cobb that protects the town of Lyme Regis--it was in the movie The French Lieutenant's Woman so that really came alive for me in the reading. In barely more than 200 pages we are given a lot--from Napoleon almost to Darwin, from the Silurian to the Cretaceous, the value of a shilling or a half crown in terms of food on the table, fossil fever and the rise of geology, the slave trade, how fossils changed a society absolutely believing in the 'truth' of genesis and paved the way for Darwin. Really a delightful book. 4.5 stars.

It always shocks me when someone in this day and age manages to dig someone out of history of whom I had never heard. The story is riveting, and it was enlightening to say the least to find out that the current debate between Creation and Evolution has been going on for a couple hundred years.

A lovely study of an important woman who has been overlooked by history. A fascinating portrait of time and place.

I guess it can be forgiven somewhat that this book was not written by a biologist, much less an evolutionary biologist, but I wish it was edited by a few. Just getting through the dust jacket and prologue grated a few nerves with me: referring to ichthyosaurs as dinosaurs when part of what defines something as a dinosaur is how it holds its legs under its body, of which ichthyosaurs have none to speak of (Though I'd assume the jacket was actually written by the publisher.) Also, the repetition of dinosaurs as great reptiles, when their exact definition of being reptiles, or even ectotherms at all, is still being disputed. As an aside, this book isn't meant to be in-depth, so these topics might be too off-track of its true purpose to go into very fully.

BUT hopefully most people who read this won't be cranky evolutionary biologists like myself, and in fact be budding biologists needing that extra kick over the edge of inspiration that this book offers and this world so dearly needs. A great source of inspiration for both women, like myself, and the sciences is sadly not as well-found as it should be.

I'd encourage any person I know to read this book, and children and teenagers to do their school biography projects on Ms. Mary Anning. (Especially since it directly inspires them into my specific field of science!) If you aren't as well-read in the facts as some people are, then this book will be a good read, just don't cite it in any scientific research papers. Biographically it is superb.

My husband and I are also fossil hunters. Most summers we dig out in the heat of Wyoming and Montana. I love this book, for these reasons: it's history value; the way women were viewed by men, the divide between the classes, and Mary's determination to educate herself in the paleontology and biology worlds, a man's world. I greatly admire Mary's determanation and courage.