Just over two hundred years ago a young girl happened upon a 17 foot long fossilised sea monster along the cliffs of the English Channel. Now known as the ichthyosaurus, her discoveries were only just getting started.
Over the next thirty-five years Mary Anning would discover the first plesiosaurus and amongst the first pterodactyls. She would nearly be killed by a landslide that buried her dog, pioneered the study of fossilised turds, became a self-taught authority on matters of anatomy (despite being barred as a woman from the Geological Society of London) and is held to be the source of the famous tongue-twister “She-sells sea-shells on the seashore”–since she sold her fossil findings to visitors to help ends meet.
Her hometown of Lyme Regis, nicknamed the “pearl of Dorset”, still thrums with her passion for palaeontology two centuries on. The cliff sides ring with the clanging of amateur fossil hunters hammering away at rocks in search of discoveries of their own. Pop into an antique shop and you’ll find an odd assortment of Victorian memorabilia, seaside postcards and the £12,000 jaw of sixty-five million year old Mosasaur (for a much more affordable 0.17p per million years, you can get a tea coaster embedded with an ancient fish). Even the lampposts are shaped like ammonites.
We spent several hours exploring the rockpools that pepper the beach at low tide and overturning rocks and pebbles in search of long-extinct lifeforms. Further away from the beach-goers and with the white cliffs running alongside you, the sea stretching out into the distance, and the dramatic lighting of an overcast English summer’s day, Lyme Regis fits the bill of an epicentre of discovery. No sign of a plesiousaurus for us, but Esme did find a rather large crab.
And then she quickly discovered the still breathing remains of an ice-cream parlour. And that was the end of the fossil hunting.
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