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FROM CREATION TO EVOLUTION:
THE YOUNG WOMAN WHO DISCOVERED DINOSAURS
A Sermon By
The Rev. Susan Manker-Seale
Delivered April 29, 2012
I know you’re expecting to hear about dinosaurs this morning, but I want to start off with a story
about dinner plates. When I was a young woman, in the 1970’s, feminism was finding a second
wind after the achievements of Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton in getting women
the vote. In Unitarian Universalism, women ministers were also finding a second wind, breaking
into a male-dominated field one step at a time. Universalists were the first to ordain a woman,
the Rev. Olympia Brown, back in the late 1800’s, and the Iowa Sisterhood was a group of
Unitarian women who were sent to the west, which was Iowa then, to build churches.
For some reason I won’t go into, women ministers melted away from our associations in the first
half of the twentieth century, so I had actually never met a woman minister, that I was aware of,
when I was growing up in the Phoenix UU church. And the feminist movement brought change
not only to the words we used in worship, but to the mindset that kept women from the pulpit,
bringing to the public the notion that women might actually have brains enough to have
something important to say, and hutzpah enough to lead. This was only forty years ago!
Feminism also brought the realization, the reality, that women had literally been written out of
much of history. Judy Chicago was an artist who confronted this by gathering many women to
research and find the stories of women throughout the ages who had made an impact on life,
enough to be mentioned somewhere. She made dinner plates to represent the ones she felt were
most important, and embroidered hundreds of names on the tablecloth underneath those plates.
Their stories were published in her book, The Dinner Party.
For the first years of its existence, The Dinner Party went into storage, because museums didn’t
think it was important enough to make a place at the table for women’s history and expression of
this radical kind. I remember trying to find it, because I wanted to go see it, because I had the
book, and I was, and am, a feminist. It is one of the long-term exhibitions, now, at the Brooklyn
Museum. Times have changed a little more.
The woman I’m going to tell you about today, though, missed even Judy Chicago’s searching
eye. The woman who discovered dinosaurs, at least, some of the major ones, was practically
written out of history by the very men who valued her work and cared at least a little for her,
some even a lot. One woman journalist just happened to stumble across her story in the town in
which all this takes place, in Lyme Regis, on the southern coast of England, and this woman
decided she had to write the story. Shelley Emling wrote a book she called The Fossil Hunter, so
that the rest of the world can learn about the gifts of one dedicated person to how we see the
world and understand ourselves.
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The woman’s name, the woman who discovered dinosaurs, was named Mary Anning.
Remember three things about her: she was very poor, part of the lowest class, with an accent
that showed it; she was a woman in a man’s world, with virtually no voice or power; and she was
a Dissenter, those who did not follow the Church of England. Dissenters were of different kinds,
and some, the liberal ones, were about to take the name Unitarian. She believed in a loving god
and in individual responsibility.
One of the terrible things Mary’s father, Richard, did, even in the eyes of his own church, was to
take his children fossil-hunting on Sundays! Mary and her older brother, Joseph, would
scramble along a coast known for its wild waves and crumbling cliffs, searching for what the
locals called “crocodile teeth” or “verteberries.” (p. 7) In those first years of the nineteenth
century, the burgeoning Industrial Age was dirtying the city air, and people of wealth or any sort
of means would find their way to the sea, to breathe clean air as was becoming popular. Fossils
made good souvenirs for their vacations, and Richard sold many to those who stayed in the
Three Cups Inn in the center of Lyme Regis, just down from the Anning’s house. (p. 32)
Mary and Joseph were the only two of their parent’s ten children to survive, and Mary barely
escaped death herself, even as a baby. The whole town had witnessed the August day in 1800
when lightning struck the woman who was holding baby Mary at a fair, and killed her, but the
doctor was able to revive Mary, declaring it a miracle. For the rest of her life, the people
attributed Mary’s quirkiness, her brilliance, and her spirit to that touch of lightning. (p.15)
Mary’s father taught himself how to find and treat fossils, and he experimented with them, being
the first to cut open the ammonite to see the crystals within, and to polish its surface. (p. 17) In
those days, anything that came out of the ground was called a fossil, being latin for “having been
dug up.” (p. 7) People believed that the fossils were God’s decorations which had been allowed
to bubble up from inside the earth, or they were the remains of the victims of the great flood of
Genesis in the Bible, or they were the result of a lightning strike. And the people came up with
all kinds of superstitious home remedies using them, believing, for example, that powdered
belemnites could clear a horse’s eye infections, and ammonites or snakestones could ward off
maladies. (p. 8)
People certainly had no understanding of what they were digging up, or what it meant to the
religious view of creation. Evolution, as we understand it today, had not yet been surmised.
Richard made his daughter a small pick to fit her hand, and taught her how to use a brush and
needle to more carefully clear away rock, thus protecting the fossil so it would be more valuable,
and he showed her how to polish the rocks. She also learned how to deal with customers, to
charm people of higher social status who came by their little table in front of their house where
they displayed their finds. (p. 16) Mary became very good at everything her father taught her.
And then, he fell on one of their excursions, and lost his interest in hunting fossils on the shore.
In a few years, he had died, most likely of tuberculosis. It was 1810, and Mary was eleven, and
Joseph fourteen. Their mother, Molly, was pregnant with no male provider.
Mary had attended Dissenters’ school for three years, learning reading and writing, so she had
some basics, and she got odd jobs in town. Joseph apprenticed to an upholsterer, but he still
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found time to go down to the beach with Mary, especially after a bad storm. It was after storms
that the cliffs would slip and reveal fossils for those daring enough to brave the waves.
After a particularly bad storm, Mary went by herself to search the beach, and found an
ammonite. What was unusual about that day was that a stranger came by and offered her half a
crown for it, which was enough to buy bread, bacon, tea, and sugar for a week! (p. 30) After
that, Joseph and Mary were often seen on the beach, but they didn’t find something every time.
They had to learn patience and perseverance.
The summer when Mary was twelve, 1811, Joseph went down on the beach by himself, and
found a giant head with 200 teeth! Perhaps it was a crocodile or a lizard. He got help to dig it up
and carry it back to their father’s workshop, but he couldn’t spend more time away from his
apprenticeship, so he asked Mary to look for the rest of the skeleton. It took her almost a year
before another storm attacked and exposed some vertebrae and ribs in the cliff. She got help
from some men in town, as she came to do for the rest of her life as a fossil hunter, and they took
out 60 vertebrae, and what looked like a large fish with a long tail. It was seventeen feet long.
She spent months finding all the bones, and everyone in town knew she had found something
extraordinary, maybe a monster! (pp. 33-34)
This strange creature had flippers like a dolphin, a mouth like a crocodile, and a pointed nose
like a swordfish, the spine of a fish and the chest of a lizard. Everyone talked about it, and the
lord of the nearby manor, Henry Hoste Henley, bought it for twenty-three pounds and gave it to
William Bullock’s Museum of Natural Curiosities, or the London Museum, where it was
exhibited in the Egyptian Hall. Six years later, it was named an ichthyosaurus by Charles Konig,
curator and keeper of natural history, who put two greek words together meaning fish and lizard,
and the name stuck even though it’s really a sea reptile. (p. 42) Mary was not credited with the
find, not at first, and this was to be her fate for most of her life. (p. 35)
This fossil started people questioning seriously the story of creation in the Bible, a story to which
the Christian society of England was completely committed. Here is the question as Shelley
Emling phrased it in the book, “How could someone have found the remains of a creature that no
longer existed when every single being in the world was designed at the same time and with a
specific purpose by a loving and all-powerful God?” (p. 38) The Geological Society of London
had just organized a few years before, in 1807, and the members grappled with their religious
beliefs and the evidence being uncovered as the earth revealed more and more to inquisitive
minds. (p. 39)
People flocked to the Egyptian Hall to view Mary’s find, and scientists wrote papers on it, giving
their diverse opinions of what it might be, never mentioning Mary. One of the views that people
grappled with was the overwhelming belief in the declaration in 1650 of the Archbishop of
Armagh, James Ussher, who calculated every single “begat” in the Bible and determined that the
world was created at 8 PM on October 23, 4004 BC. (p. 43)
On the other hand, scientists were dedicating their lives to exploring these finds and speculating
on their meaning. In 1796, just before Mary Anning was born, the great French naturalist
Georges Cuvier had argued that mammoths were entirely different species from elephants, and
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were extinct, introducing the idea of extinction for the first time. He said it was highly unlikely
that these animals were still roaming the world without anyone noticing. (p. 48) U.S. President
Thomas Jefferson became interested in Cuvier, and got the notion in his head that maybe these
giant creatures were hiding in the wilderness of the American west. He actually asked Lewis and
Clark to look for them on their trek in 1803. (p. 49)
Mary was befriended by lots of people who got the fossil-hunting bug. One was Henry De la
Beche, who clambered with her over the rocks and surf in spite of being of the upper class. He
was sixteen when Mary was thirteen, but their differences in class served to keep them separate
all their lives. Still, they encouraged each other, and De la Beche decided to study geology and
eventually became very well-known. She also was befriended by Rev. William Buckland,
professor of Geology at Oxford, who would visit and hunt fossils and discuss their meaning with
her before going back to his comfortable household.
Mary taught herself, by copying any articles by geologists she could get her hands on, dissecting
animals, and meticulously drawing what she saw. Gentleman scientists came to see her, to ask
her to take them down to the cliffs and hunt for fossils, and she always obliged them. She found
two more ichthyosaurus skeletons, but starvation threatened no matter how much she found,
partly due to the country’s economy and the end of the Napoleonic wars.
Smuggling became the way to get food for many of the poorest folk, and whenever Mary found a
lost cask on the beach, she’d cover it to hide it from Customs, then tell someone in need where to
find it. Someone finally came to save her: Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Birch. He visited the
Annings in 1820 when they were desperate, about to sell their furniture, and he came up with a
plan. He sold his entire collection of fossils for their benefit, including an ichthyosaur, holding
the sale at the London Museum. They made 400 pounds, equal to about $50,000 today, and he
gave it all to the Annings. This self-less act made Mary famous, and no longer destitute.
She found more ichthyosaurs, but they were credited to the men who bought them. Some men
were beginning to defend her, and wrote articles praising her. George Cumberland wrote in the
Bristol newspaper that Mary Anning had pinched from the cliffs “relics of a former world...at the
continual risk of being crushed by the suspended fragments they leave behind...To her exertions
we owe nearly all the fine specimens of ichthyosaur of the great collections.” (p. 77)
In 1823, when Mary was 24 years old, she uncovered the remains of a creature who would give
rise to “serious contemplations on evolution,” and feed into Darwin’s theories on evolution.
That skeleton was named “Plesiosaurus Giganticus.” (p. 85) She worked closely with
geologists, gentlemen and their wives, for all her life, befriending not a few, and became wellknown in her time, but never was she invited to visit the Geological Society of London, it being
men-only, and, in fact, she only visited London once, her only trip away from Lyme Regis where
she was born, and where she died in 1847 of breast cancer.
Her major discoveries were the ichthyosaur, the plesiosaur, the pterodactylus, and the squaloraja.
Her friend Anna Maria Pinney wrote of Mary that “men of learning have sucked her brains, and
made a great deal by publishing works, of which she furnished the contents, while she derived
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none of the advantages.” (p. 150) She is the unknown “she” of the tongue-twister, “She sells
sea-shells by the sea shore,” written by Terry Sullivan fifty years after her death.
The Lyme Regis shoreline has been named a UNESCO World Heritage site, in the same league
as the Grand Canyon. And yet, there are still people refusing to let go of the biblical view of
creation, as evidenced by the book in the Grand Canyon store a few years back which provided
the creationist’s view for our browsing children. Someone ought to write a children’s book
about Mary Anning and the fossils she risked her life to uncover, not just for a living, but for the
love of exploring and learning some of the mysteries of the earth. I hope you’ll share her story
with someone, and reflect on the evolution, not just of the earth, but of human respect and
dignity, gender-based and otherwise.
Beacon UU Congregation, Flagstaff