Pencil drawings of mainly fossil marine reptile teeth.
#FossilFriday: Mary Anning's hand-drawn copy of a plate of ichthyosaur and other teeth copied from WD Conybeare's 1822 paper, Additional Notices on Ichthyosaurus and Plesiosaurus. #MaryAnning
![Top left, portrait of Mary Anning in a green cloak and straw bonnet, holding a hammer and with a basket over her arm; top right, photograph of Lord Cole, later 3rd Earl of Enniskillen, in a dark frock coat and waistcoat, bow tie, and with a beard; bottom, extract from a letter from Mary Anning to Cole: '...I have about 12 Ophiuras fro 1 shilling to 5, pines from 1 to 7/6, only 3 specimens of Logo not first rate one iridescent one in stone a a slab of Penta[crinites] at £1-5-0 Ammonites both polished and rough from 1 shilling to 25s ...'](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:vcl75pfg74dsskrzvynq5rez/bafkreihn4yyhab53r7gfotoqantbbzq6v34peuqis264mkxwgflzrtbieu)
Top left, portrait of Mary Anning in a green cloak and straw bonnet, holding a hammer and with a basket over her arm; top right, photograph of Lord Cole, later 3rd Earl of Enniskillen, in a dark frock coat and waistcoat, bow tie, and with a beard; bottom, extract from a letter from Mary Anning to Cole: '...I have about 12 Ophiuras fro 1 shilling to 5, pines from 1 to 7/6, only 3 specimens of Logo not first rate one iridescent one in stone a a slab of Penta[crinites] at £1-5-0 Ammonites both polished and rough from 1 shilling to 25s ...'
1 April 1839: Mary Anning writes to her friend fossil collector Lord Cole with prices of fossils she has in stock, including starfish from 1 to 5 shillings, Pinna from 1 shilling to 7s 6d, Pentacrinites for £1 5s and ammonites, some cut and polished from 1 shilling to 25 shillings. #MaryAnning
Cover of the programme for the 2026 Lyme Regis Fossil Festival with a reconstruction of a pterosaur.
This year's programme for the Lyme Regis Fossil Festival is now online at fossilfestival.com! A weekend packed with all sorts of events - talks, walks, displays and demos. I'll be there talking about #MaryAnning, of course, and leading a walk around the places she knew well. Hope to see you there!
Photograph of a large group of people who were attending a conference. Photographer unknown.
Today is the centenary of the birth of novelist John Fowles. Known to many of us as Hon Curator of Lyme Regis Museum, he had a great interest in #MaryAnning. He's seated, front row, with stick, at the 1999 Mary Anning bicentenary conference with many of the big name historians of geology of the day.
"We'll have to prove them wrong." Mary Anning said it in the early 1800s. Michele Hollow is still telling the story because it still needs to be told. Fossils millions of years old. The oldest story in the book: someone does the work, someone else gets the credit.
#maryanning #historicalfiction
Portrait of Mary Anning in a green cloak and straw bonnet, holding a hammer and with a basket over her arm.
Extract of a letter from Mary Anning.
Great news that Lyme Regis Museum was successful in purchasing the #MaryAnning letter fragment at auction today. Congratulations to all at the museum and to the Friends of Lyme Regis Museum who organised the fund-raising. And thanks to all who contributed to bring it home to Lyme Regis.
Top left, portrait of Adam Sedgwick; bottom left, large block of Shap granite inscribed 'Adam Sedgwick 1785–1873)' in the Yorkshire village of Dent where he was born; top right, Sedgwick map of North Wales; bottom right, extract form Sedgwick's journal of 1820 'After breakfast purchase fossils of Miss Anning - walk to the Charmouth Cliffs...'
22 March 1785, Dent, Yorkshire: birth of Cambridge geologist Adam Sedgwick. Best known for his work on the Palaeozoic rocks, naming the Cambrian and Devonian systems, and teaching a Mr C. Darwin field geology, he also bought a number of fossils from #MaryAnning whom he first visited in 1820.
Sepia-coloured blob with a narrow elongate extension to the left, a drawing of a cephalopod ink sac with a pencil caption, 'fossil sepia'.
#FossilFriday: a fossil sepia ink sac drawn with fossil sepia in 1834 by Lyme Regis fossil collector and friend of #MaryAnning, Elizabeth Philpot. The pencil annotation is by Oxford geologist William Buckland. More on fossil sepia coming in the next issue of @hoggroup.bsky.social's GeoHistories.
This #FossilFriday, Lyme Regis Museum is aiming to buy a handwritten letter by #MaryAnning. To help raise the funds, an auction featuring an original piece of art by palaeoartist Lee Brown is now live. Please consider bidding and helping the museum raise these funds :) www.zeffy.com/en-GB/ticket...
🤓I’m very happy to share some wonderful news! 🎬✨
🎉Together with my colleague I. Satkūnienė, we will be opening a paleontology-themed animated film about the remarkable Mary Anning 🦴🦕 #maryanning #fossil #paleontology
If you'd like to support the fundraising campaign of the Friends of Lyme Regis Museum to help acquire this #MaryAnning partial letter for the museum, you can make a donation here:
www.lymeregismuseum.co.uk/about-us/fri...
#MaryAnning The Friends of Lyme Regis Museum have launched a fundraising appeal for an interesting and rare partial letter written by Mary Anning that's coming up at auction. It would be great to bring this back home. Please consider donating. More here:
www.lymeregismuseum.co.uk/about-us/fri...
A comparison of part of two portraits showing a small black and white dog and some fossils.
#FossilFriday: spot the fossils around Mary Anning's dog Tray in the two famous portraits of #MaryAnning, just some of many differences between the two pictures.
I'd like to celebrate Mary Anning on International Womens Day. A pioneering fossil hunter whose discoveries helped shape the science of palaeontology.
Her curiosity, resilience, and dedication to science continue to inspire generations today.
#InternationalWomensDay #MaryAnning #WomenInScience
Portrait of Mary Anning in February 1842. She wears a long green cloak and a straw bonnet tied with a red ribbon. She holds a hammer and carries a basket. AT her feet are some fossils and her dog.
Palaeontologist #MaryAnning was a legend in her lifetime. From 1821 to 1846 she's mentioned in at least 250 newspapers, magazines, popular books and scientific papers & books. Hundreds of geologists and tourists went to Lyme Regis to meet 'the celebrated Mary Anning'.
#InternationalWomensDay
Left, photograph of a man in a dark coat and light waistcoat, standing next to a bookcase; right, a fossil fish in a dark stone frame.
5 March 1807, Shropshire: birth of Beriah Botfield, antiquarian, bibliographer, collector, MP. He attended the geology lectures of William Buckland at Oxford and in 1829 purchased a Dapedium & a small ichthyosaur from #MaryAnning & gave them to Buckland. They're still @morethanadodo.bsky.social
Left. extract from Strickland's 1845 paper 'On certain Calcareo-corneous Bodies found in the outer chambers of Ammonites' which begins by acknowledging Mary Anning; right portrait of Strickland as a young man, seated and holding an open book.
2 March 1811, Reighton, Yorkshire: birth of geologist and naturalist Hugh Strickland. In 1841 #MaryAnning drew his attention to a feature of ammonite shells which she thought were ink sacs but were in fact aptychi, plates used for closing off the aperture of the shell. #MolluscMonday
Top left, book title page 'Letters and Sounds: an Introduction to English Reading on an Entirely New Plan'; right, photograph of Alexander Melville Bell in full Victorian hirsuteness; bottom left, an extract form his book of elocution exercises, including 'She sells sea shells'
1 March 1819, Edinburgh: birth of Alexander Melville Bell. An elocution & phonetics lecturer at Edinburgh University, his 1855 book 'Letters and Sounds' included as an elocution exercise some tongue-twisting short sentences, amongst them ‘She sells sea-shells’. There is no connection to #MaryAnning.
Title page pf a book, 'A Natural History of the Crinoidea, or Lily-Shape Animals' by J.S. Miller, 1821.
A plate from Miller's 1821 book showing part of the stem and arms of the Jurassic crinoid Pentacrinites briareus.
26 February 1779, Danzig, Prussia: birth of palaeontologist & curator Johann Samuel Müller. In 1801 he settled in Bristol after missing his ship to the US, adopted the name Miller, collected fossil crinoids & in 1821 defined the Class Crinoidea. He gave a copy of his book to #MaryAnning in 1824.
Interior view of a stained glass window in a church, with pews in the foreground and monuments on the wall.
In February 1850 a William Wailes stained glass window of the Six Acts of Mercy from St Matthew's Gospel was installed in St Michael's Church, Lyme Regis in memory of #MaryAnning by the vicar and her friends at the Geological Society. It recognises both her contribution to geology and her charity.
Lovely geologically-themed poem here, traversing the Chalk from Lyme to Hunstanton, with more than a nod to #MaryAnning.
Annotated sketch by George Cumberland of a skeleton of Plesiosaurus showing its long neck, small head and four paddle-like limbs, and emphasising a scatter of vertebrae at the base of the neck.
About 24 February 1824 Bristol fossil collector George Cumberland sent his drawing (copied from one by #MaryAnning) of Plesiosaurus to Charles Konig at the British Museum asking if he thought the bones all belonged to one animal. Konig had seen the fossil and replied that it was 'perfectly genuine'.
Chalk Vespers 1847 Mary Anning, Palaeontology pioneer, Vanishes from the Upper World. Her Spirit, with Cephalopod agility, Enters the chalk-pored Dorset Downs near Lyme, Harrowing the holloways of The Great Ridgeway, as it glances Stonehenge and Wayland Smithy waymarks. Crests the Chilterns at Ivinghoe Beacon, Grooving the ancient droves of Icknield Way, until it lopes into an Eleventh-hour chicane at Knettishall Heath. From where, Drawn by the timber-circled Seahenge lodestone, and Shadowing the progress of Penitents along Peddars Way, it Emerges at Holme. Following the setting sun to The Wash, Mary Anning’s spirit Nests itself in the dreams of one Henry L'Estrange Styleman Le Strange Who, sensing a gathering Apocalypse - Uncovering, Unfolding - Seeks to eclipse his north-winded Fishing village with a West-facing wise folly. Gothic-revival reverie bodied forth in Honeystone-Town, Hunstanton, Quarried and fashioned from the very Carrstone that edges out Albion in the Layer-Cake Cliffs, Where Solstice-sun illumination of Ancient barrows has since Become a nightly Vespers: Stratified slice of Earth’s Deep-Time testimonies Bathed in an Evening light that Sanctifies seventy-seven Million years of the Cretaceous. Man’s two-millennia Tenure as Crown of Creation: Guttering lantern glow that Cuts a Faltering path through the Gloaming. © Jan Peters/Solivagant Wisdom, 2025
Map of the Great Chalk Way network of long-distance paths, starting at Lyme Regis, Dorset in southwest England, and ending at Holme-next-the-Sea in Norfolk, East Anglia. Mary Anning's ghost/spirit follows this route in the poem.
©Jan Peters/Solivagant Wisdom, 2021 Layer-Cake Cliffs at Hunstanton, Norfolk, England.
🙏 @victoriaspires.bsky.social #PromptCombo #Rupture
#poem / #photography:
©Jan Peters/Solivagant Wisdom, 2025/2021
#poetry #MaryAnning #Chalk #Ridgeway #WestCountry #Chilterns #EastAnglia #ScienceAndPoetry #GreatChalkWay #Hunstanton
It was at that same memorable meeting of the Geological Society on 20 February 1824 that William Buckland described Megalosaurus; this got a lot of attention in 2024, but 200 years earlier it was #MaryAnning 's strange Plesiosaurus and its long neck that everyone wanted to hear about.
![Top, title of the published paper 'On the discovery of an almost perfect specimen of the Plesiosaurus by the Rev. W.D. Conybeare'; right, portrait of Conybeare; left, centre, the later published plate of the specimen showing is unexpectedly long neck; left, bottom, extract from a book by Gideon Mantell 'The specimen... was discovered and developed by the late Mary Anning, of Lyme Regis and purchased by the late Duke of Buckingham for (I believe) 105£ [it was £110]. I had the pleasure of being present when Mr Conybeare read the Memoir at the meeting if the Geological Society in Bedford Street, Covent Garden; the specimen was placed in the vestibule at the entrance, for want of room' [actually it was too big and too heavy to carry upstairs].](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:vcl75pfg74dsskrzvynq5rez/bafkreihqhsk4widyx7imcsxo3wpa4kmnbrobqx5m7syp7dtblwhukznvwu)
Top, title of the published paper 'On the discovery of an almost perfect specimen of the Plesiosaurus by the Rev. W.D. Conybeare'; right, portrait of Conybeare; left, centre, the later published plate of the specimen showing is unexpectedly long neck; left, bottom, extract from a book by Gideon Mantell 'The specimen... was discovered and developed by the late Mary Anning, of Lyme Regis and purchased by the late Duke of Buckingham for (I believe) 105£ [it was £110]. I had the pleasure of being present when Mr Conybeare read the Memoir at the meeting if the Geological Society in Bedford Street, Covent Garden; the specimen was placed in the vestibule at the entrance, for want of room' [actually it was too big and too heavy to carry upstairs].
20 February 1824: William Conybeare reads his much-anticipated paper on #MaryAnning 's complete Plesiosaurus to a packed meeting of the Geological Society. Gideon Mantell recalled that the specimen was in the hallway. It was too big & heavy to carry up the narrow staircase to the meeting room.
Ink sketch of a minor eruption within the crater of Vesuvius in 1829, a view looking down into the crater within which a small cone is erupting.
15 February 1829: Visiting the Bay of Naples, Lyme Regis geologist Henry De la Beche, a friend of #MaryAnning, observes and sketches a minor eruption within the summit crater of Vesuvius.
Left, portrait of Mary Anning in a green cloak and straw bonnet, holding a hammer and with a basket over her arm; top right, extract of a letter from Anning to Buckland 'I have this day just sent of the drawing to Baron Cuvier – I hardly know whether I wish him to purchase it or not it is such a uniq one to be sent out of the Country however I can’t help it'; bottom right, her sketch of her fossil fish sent to Adam Sedgwick a year later.
15 February 1830: #MaryAnning tells William Buckland that she's sent a sketch of a strange fossil fish to Cuvier in Paris, but would prefer it to remain in England: 'I hardly know whether I wish him to purchase it or not it is such a uniq one to be sent out of the Country however I can’t help it'.
If you're anywhere around Adelaide, South Australia (or feel like popping over in the next few weeks), check out A Curious Thing, a wonderful musical of the story of #MaryAnning by @heapsgood.bsky.social which opens at the Adelaide Fringe on 25 February.
adelaidefringe.com.au/fringetix/a-...
Great news today that the geology collection at Lyme Regis Museum has been awarded Designated Status by Arts Council England. Not only does it occupy the site of #MaryAnning 's childhood home, but her spirit lives on in the museum's collecting and research.
www.lymeregismuseum.co.uk/designation/
Close up photograph of the bony plates of an ichthyosaur eye, a circle of buff-coloured bones in grey limestone.
#FossilFriday: Always worth keeping an eye out for this specimen if you visit @nhm-london.bsky.social, the ichthyosaur found at Lyme Regis by #MaryAnning and her brother in 1811–12, the first specimen to come to scientific attention, and its impressive ring of sclerotic plates.
