A little science is a dangerous thing.

Prayer does not use up artificial energy, doesn't burn up any fossil fuel, doesn't pollute. Neither does song, neither does love, neither does the dance. Margaret Mead.



Who would have thought it? I'm interested in fossils. True, not enough to pick up one of those little hammer thingies & go fossicking muddy shorelines but then I'm not a spinster lady relegated to Lyme Regis at a time when it was a social disaster to be female, unmarried & "monetarily constrained". No, I do my fossicking from the comfort of my armchair with coffee & chocolate to hand while the erratic summer rain scuds across the bay in great white drifts & thunders down upon my tin roof.


The things one learns though! Did you know the greatest fossilist the world has ever known was a woman?! Yes, well I didn't, science not really being my thing & all & me not being much of a feminist either. Her name is Mary Anning. She is credited with discovering the first ichthyosaur fossil , the first 2 plesiosaur skeletons ever found & the first pterosaur skeletons found outside of Germany. Click here to see the fossils.


I don't even know what those things are, could care less really. They're dead & all that remains is funny outlines inside bits of rock but Mary is fascinating if you know anything about the England of 1799~1847 [the period of Mary's lifespan]. Think Jane Austen & you have the picture. Women of a certain social standing were expected to marry. The " Lower classes" were expected to know their place ~ & keep it. Mary was lower class. Worse her family were *dissenters* & congregationalists rather than Anglicans. This shut Mary out of fully participating in the scientific community of early 19th century Britain & consequentially she did not always receive the credit she should for her finds. She wasn't even well educated, learning to read at Sunday school & copying scientific papers by hand but she knew her subject so well she was widely regarded as the foremost authority on fossils in England.


Mary is the subject of Tracy Chevallier's novel, Remarkable Creatures, which details her surprising friendship with Elizabeth Philpot, their study of the fossil rich shores of Lyme Regis & their struggle as intelligent & well informed women in the arrogant male dominated scientific circles of their times. Fascinating read.