The Fossil Hunter
Dinosaurs, Evolution, and the Woman Whose Discoveries Changed the World
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
At a time when women were excluded from science, a young girl made a discovery that marked the birth of paleontology and continues to feed the debate about evolution to this day.
Mary Anning was only twelve years old when, in 1811, she discovered the first dinosaur skeleton--of an ichthyosaur--while fossil hunting on the cliffs of Lyme Regis, England. Until Mary's incredible discovery, it was widely believed that animals did not become extinct. The child of a poor family, Mary became a fossil hunter, inspiring the tongue-twister, "She Sells Sea Shells by the Seashore." She attracted the attention of fossil collectors and eventually the scientific world. Once news of the fossils reached the halls of academia, it became impossible to ignore the truth. Mary's peculiar finds helped lay the groundwork for Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, laid out in his On the Origin of Species. Darwin drew on Mary's fossilized creatures as irrefutable evidence that life in the past was nothing like life in the present.
A story worthy of Dickens, The Fossil Hunter chronicles the life of this young girl, with dirt under her fingernails and not a shilling to buy dinner, who became a world-renowned paleontologist. Dickens himself said of Mary: "The carpenter's daughter has won a name for herself, and deserved to win it."
Here at last, Shelley Emling returns Mary Anning, of whom Stephen J. Gould remarked, is "probably the most important unsung (or inadequately sung) collecting force in the history of paleontology," to her deserved place in history.
Customer Reviews
What a great read!
I really loved this book. Shelley Emling, the talented author, proves that biographies don't need to be about celebrities, famous political figures or scientific luminaries to be fascinating. Her book is about an extremely poor, unknown woman living in a tiny English seaside town in early 1800's who collected fossils in relative obscurity only to have some of the most distinguished scientists of the last 200 years then stand on her shoulders, including Charles Darwin.
This book is not fascinating in the same way that a Winston Churchill book would be. Mary Anning didn't save a nation from war, cure a persistent, infectious disease, or discover electricity. Her story is fascinating simply because of her station in life and the time period of which she was from - and in spite of that - she quietly toiled away making discoveries equal to that of scientific giants. With her credit largely going to others, she continued her hardscrabble life with it's limited options for a woman of her day and changed the world.
I can't wait to visit Lyme Regis, see the small museum that bears her story, and walk the same dangerous cliffs where her discoveries that spawned entire scientific disciplines were made.
I feel like finding this book is in a way like finding an unexpected, but beautiful fossil on a walk along a seaside bluff. You will appreciate this book most if you are either a lover of history or science.
Highly recommended.