From the Natural History Museum to the Cliffs of Lyme Regis: A Mary Anning Unit Study for High School

My poor homeschooled teenager has never in her life gone on a vacation that wasn't educational. Heck, even when we went to Disney World I made the kids take a class there, and that was after we'd spent months watching videos about ride engineering and making stop-motion animations, etc. 

Two weeks in England, then, is obviously the spine for a one-credit high school class entitled The History and Culture of England, a cross-curricular combo of Social Studies and ELA, with a little bit of science and art sneaked in just for funsies.

statue of Mary Anning at Lyme Regis

With visits to the British Museum, Natural History Museum, and Lyme Regis, one of our topics of study for this class is Mary Anning, the fossil hunter and entrepreneur whose uncredited work supported much of the paleontological scholarship of the Regency and early Victorian eras. 

If you're studying a historical figure, a good intro activity is to collect several children's biographies and read/compare/evaluate them. Picture books are often surprisingly informative, and comparing several means that one can gather a larger amount of information than can be found in just one book. Picture books are also intended to be fun to read, and they're quick to get through, so on the whole it's a very unintimidating activity that provides a good starting point for further study.

Here are the children's books about Mary Anning that I collected from my local public library:

• Dragon Bones, by Sarah Glenn Marsh
• Lightning Mary, by Anthea Simmons
• Mary Anning: Fossil Hunter, by Sally M. Walker
• Mary Anning's Curiosity, by Monica Kulling
• Rare Treasures: Mary Anning and Her Remarkable Discoveries, by Don Brown

Of these, I think that Dragon Bones is by far the best and Lightning Mary is by far the worst. 

An adult biography that's interesting to read (or listen to via audiobook) is Jurassic Mary. And after that, one can watch the indie film Ammonite to find the small references to factual parts of Anning's life and discuss how/why the creators chose to diverge from the known facts in other parts. Tack on an essay or a creative response like a cartoon or work of fanfic and that's a pretty solid little ELA unit right there!

Because Mary Anning and Jane Austen were contemporaries, roughly (Jane Austen was once extremely rude to Mary Anning's father), another good text to add to the ELA component of the study is Jane Austen's Persuasion, partly set in Lyme Regis. Jane Austen and Mary Anning were of different economic and social classes, and it's an interesting activity to read a Jane Austen novel and try to piece in where these invisible tradespeople ought to be. Austen was revolutionary for her female voice, but she was still classist!

One ichthyosaur fossil definitely found by Mary Anning, and two more with unknown provenance but possibly also found by her, in the Natural History Museum in London

Since we visited London and Lyme Regis, Anning's position in time and place were both crucial to our study in a way that would probably be difficult to replicate at home. Lyme Regis' location in rural Dorset apparently made it a backwater during Anning's time, and people who made the effort to travel the one road into town or take a ship into the Roman harbor generally thought that the residents of Lyme Regis were a bunch of hicks. I wouldn't be surprised if they'd acted like a bunch of hicks, either, and just maybe part of my passion for Anning is because I think she, just like baby Julie in rural Arkansas, might have felt intellectually out of place in her cultural home. But even today, we could see how out of the way Lyme Regis still is just by driving there, down one VERY narrow country road and into a town with roads even more narrow--and this is after they'd historically been widened a couple of times since the invention of cars! Everything in Lyme Regis was either uphill or downhill, and none of it was far from the ocean.

The time period in which Anning lived also went from being a paleontological backwater, when paleontology didn't even exist as a science, nor did the word "dinosaur," to a thriving landscape of prehistoric creatures as the topics of study--many of whom had been discovered and prepared by Anning! It's pretty outrageous to read the list of names, all male, that crossed paths with Anning, learned from her, bought fossils from her, and then turned around and used her fossils and her knowledge to better their own positions. It's gross how many men bought a brand-new fossil from her... and then named it after themselves. We could see this at the Natural History Museum in London--although the signage now lists Mary Anning as the finder of a fossil when that can be proven, the original labels on the fossils often mention just the names of those rich guys who bought the fossils from her, and there are SO many other fossils that probably came from Anning, but it just can't be proven because the rich guys didn't even bother to write down her name. Who knows how much the scope of her work could be expanded if we just had an accurate count of how many fossils she'd found and where they'd all gone?

Fossil Marine Reptiles Gallery in the Natural History Museum in London

Ultimately, it's impossible to know the full extent of Anning's contribution, and the necessity for speculation, I think, makes her a terrific topic of study for high schoolers. So many historical figures presented to high schoolers to study are super well-known, with no room or need for further speculation. But true scholarship requires the presentation of ideas and opinions and theories, and the true work is in justifying it. And with Mary Anning's life and work, there's a lot of scope for speculation!