Day 5 in England: The Natural History Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum

Overall, my teenager was fairly patient with being hauled along on Mom's England Trip of a Lifetime, but this kid who used to be my best traveler now insists that she hates all travel with the fire of a thousand suns... and she hates visiting museums with the fire of almost a thousand suns.

Funnily enough, the kid who used to be the worst traveler... just, OMG the WORST TRAVELER!... is now the best traveler ever, and by that I mean that she loves all the same travel things that I do: museums, tours of old shit, a few more museums, grubbing in the mud to find literal trash, eating local junk food, and for a nightcap, we'll hit up one more museum then go to bed early so that on the next day we can be at our first museum right when it opens.

So although I was sad to leave my teenager home on this day of museums, she was ecstatic to have the choice to opt out and spend the whole day just rattling around the AirBnb by herself.

And my college student and I, Matt in tow, were ecstatic to catch the bus around the corner and take it all the way to the front door of the Natural History Museum.

We were there right when it opened!

I was the most excited to see the Fossil Marine Reptiles Hall, which is where Mary Anning lives, but in the interest of crowd control, we first hit up the gallery I was second most excited to see:

DINOSAURS!!!

This was not my favorite dinosaur exhibit--for some reason, many of the fossils were mounted overhead, in dim light--

--and I had a lot of trouble simply making them out, much less peering closely and nearsightedly at all their tiny details, as I prefer. 

Still, there were some wonderful treasures! Here is part of the first (known) T-Rex fossil ever discovered:

We also saw the first known Iguanodon fossils ever discovered, two teeth found by Mary Ann Mantell. Later, a quarry owner discovered part of an Iguanodon skeleton inside a limestone slab that had been blasted apart. These Iguanodon teeth are another example of men intercepting women's finds and claiming them as their own, as it's Mary Ann's husband, Gideon, who gets most of the credit for the Iguanodon. To be fair, he was the one who researched it and described it, but he's also the one who had the education and the freedom of movement to do so.

I'm interested in the history of paleontology, and I like to look at exhibits that are still set up to look like they might have in the 1800s and early 1900s. It was really fun, then, that both the British Museum and the Natural History Museum had exhibits like this!

I like to look at the labels on older fossils to see if anyone interesting collected them. A couple of these fossils are labeled as coming from the Mantell collection, as in Gideon Mantell, and a couple more are labeled as having been collected by W.E. Cutler. There's not a ton of information about him, but a couple of cool points: he died of malaria in 1925 while on a dinosaur dig in Africa, and he has a mystery! In 1920, Cutler uncovered a partial Chasmosaurus skeleton and put it in storage to await a buyer. In 1921, he was hired to dig in Africa, where he died. He left no records saying what he did with his Chasmosaurus or where it is. There *is* a Chasmosaurus fossil in the Natural History Museum that resembles the field photographs of Cutler's fossil, but it doesn't have any associated records. 

I would happily spend the rest of my life in some museum's endless archives, puttering away and solving little mysteries like this one.

There were several good specimens from the collection of Georges Cuvier, who I used to be into until I learned about his WHOLE THING with "scientific" racism. He "dissected" the enslaved human trafficking victim Sarah Baartman after her death, not to figure out why she died but to get some primary source support for his racist beliefs, part of which included the idea that Adam and Eve were white. He was super gross, and I'm not happy to have to add him to my list of Misogynistic Men of Science. 

After the dinosaurs, since we were in the area and all, we looked at every mammal, every invertebrate, and every fish, reptile, and amphibian:

Then... Mary Anning!!!

Mary Anning's first articulated plesiosaur fossil!!!

I do not understand the Natural History Museum's obsession with displaying artifacts up high, but a large number of my precious plesiosaurs and ichthyosaurs were mounted easily 15 feet up. I can't read the labels from that high! I can't closely inspect every bone!

Seriously, look at this nonsense!

Still, even though you have to crane your neck, there were so many beautiful fossils. Look at Mary Anning's marvelous ichthyosaurs!

I love how they're still in their original mounts, in their cases that call them Sea-Dragons!

Only the bottom fossil has a known provenance from Mary Anning, but she probably found the other two, as well. 

Two interesting things about the below inscription: 1) he uses the phrased "purchased from Mary Anning," which is a great way to not admit that she also discovered and prepared the fossil, and 2) he says that she found another part of this fossil later and sent it to him, which shows how well she remembered all of her discoveries, enough to connect one piece to another years apart, and that she was too generous for her own good. She ought to have charged him through the fucking nose for that piece.

This is Mary Anning's biggest ichthyosaur. Matt couldn't even get the whole thing in the same frame as me!

It's so big that it has other fossils ON it!

We could have easily stayed at the Natural History Museum until it closed, and we did swing by most of the other galleries, but on this day I also really wanted to check out the Victoria and Albert Museum, conveniently located just across the street. There was nothing in particular that I'd been excited about seeing there, but of course I DID find marvelous things!

See the pipe found on the Thames foreshore?!? SQUEE!!!

Thanks to all the Medieval art I studied in my misguided twenties, I got very distracted by all the lovely rood screens--

Awww, look at that beautiful sculpture of a bunch of men torturing a lone woman!

--and effigies--

--and dragons!

I really loved the large-scale architectural elements in the Victoria and Albert. The museum has saved pieces like staircases, entire balconies, and decorated columns-and you can look at them!

There was also a wonderful display of jewelry, so the college student and I spent a LOT of time inching our way around the jewelry exhibit, peering at every tiny ring and reading its label twice, then peering at it again with renewed interest based on what we'd learned from the label. I'm low-key obsessed with iron jewelry now--it was great to wear during mourning and during wartimes after you'd donated your precious metal jewelry, but it's also super bad-ass and I would wear it all the freaking time if I had it.

Also bad-ass? Queen Victoria's sapphire and diamond coronet!

It was designed by Prince Albert, who apparently had excellent taste and was in charge of making sure all of Victoria's jewelry was beautiful and classy.

I don't wear jewelry, but I could use someone with excellent taste to make sure that all of my cargo pants and T-shirts and sneakers are beautiful and classy!

Here's our trip so far!

• Day 1: We made it to England!
• Day 2: Westminster Abbey, National Gallery, Trafalgar Square, and Six
• Day 3: British Museum and Buckingham Palace
• Day 4: Mudlarks and Southwark
• Day 5: Natural History Museum and Victoria and Albert Museum
• Day 6: Pax Lodge, the Tower of London, and Afternoon Tea
• Day 7: Back and Forth by Boat to Greenwich
• Day 8: We Careen Our Way to Canterbury Cathedral and Dover Beach
• Day 9: Dover, Hastings, and a Holloway
• Day 10, Part 1: All the Giant Rocks
• Day 10, Part 2: Stonehenge, At Last!
• Day 11: To Avalon with King Arthur
• Day 12: Tintagel
• Day 13: In the Footsteps of Mary Anning
• Day 14: Homewards!

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!