fact
Victor Lustig was one of the 20th century’s greatest con artists, and the crown jewel of his many ploys was selling the Eiffel Tower to unsuspecting scrap iron dealers—twice. Hit play for Lustig’s Ten Commandments for aspiring con men.
January 31, 2017 – 7:00pm
On August 25, 1835, readers of the New York newspaper The Sun were enthralled by reports of life on the moon. An astronomer who had built a huge telescope reported lunar bison, moonscape meadows, and bipedal beavers. Readers ate it up, boosting The Sun‘s circulation—too bad it was a hoax.
January 29, 2017 – 1:00pm
The idea that close friendships are one of life’s great joys should come as news to nobody. Before you and your best friend were friends—and even before you and your best friend were at all—Aristotle mused that, “A true friend is one soul in two bodies.” (See? Old news.) But new research suggests that having a best friend throughout childhood can have lasting psychological benefits and improve one’s coping abilities in later life. And you thought all you got out of it was that rusty old BFF necklace.
January 28, 2017 – 8:00pm
In 2003, the BBC asked 140,000 Britons to come up with the nation’s top 100 novels. Just two writers had five works that cracked the top 100: Charles Dickens and the late Sir Terry Pratchett.
Pratchett, who was born in Buckinghamshire on April 28, 1948, wrote or co-wrote more than 70 books during his lifetime. His debut novel, The Carpet People—a slightly-altered version of a fantasy serial Pratchett wrote while working at his local paper, the Bucks Free Press—was published in 1971, followed by the bestselling Discworld series. Set on a magical, disc-shaped world supported by four elephants who in turn ride atop a gigantic turtle, these masterworks of comic fantasy have collectively sold more than 80 million copies worldwide. Here are 10 things they won’t teach you at Unseen University.
In 1980, Pratchett left the Bucks Free Press to take a job as a press officer for the Central Electricity Generating Board (CEGB), where his responsibilities mainly involved reassuring the public about the safety of this organization’s nuclear power plants. (It was no easy task; the CEGB hired him just a few months after the Three Mile Island accident in Pennsylvania.) On the side, Pratchett wrote and published the first four Discworld novels: The Colour of Magic, The Light Fantastic, Equal Rites, and Mort. Following their success, he resigned from his CEGB post to write full-time.
Many Discworld inhabitants go by peculiar names (just ask Moist von Lipwig or Carrot Ironfoundersson), but many of them don’t come from thin air. “A lot of what people think of as weird names in my books are real names,” he told an interviewer in 2011. Granny Weatherwax, for example, shares her last name with Rudd Weatherwax, who trained several of the Lassie dogs that appeared in various films and television shows.
But not all of Pratchett’s characters were named after real people. Take the bumbling wizard Rincewind, whose name comes from “By the Way,” a humorous newspaper column that ran in The Daily Express from 1919 to 1975. Written for most of that time by J.B. Morgan under the pseudonym “Beachcomber,” this series featured a number of recurring fictional characters, including a red-bearded dwarf named Churm Rincewind.
As a boy, Pratchett was an avid reader of “By the Way,” and while penning The Colour of Magic, he used the name Rincewind without realizing that he’d borrowed it from Morgan’s columns. A Discworld fan later pointed this out to the novelist, at which point Pratchett “went back through all the [published ‘Beachcomber’ anthologies] and found the name and thought, oh, blast, that’s where it came from. And then I thought, what the hell, anyway.” (His argument is slightly weakened by Rincewind saying in the Colour of Magic, “I suppose we’ll take the coast road to Chirm.”)
The Science of Discworld novels combine fantasy and hard science. In the first of these books, a mishap at Unseen University creates “Roundworld,” a bizarro universe laden with strange, spherical planets governed not by magic but by the laws of physics. The school’s faculty experiments with and explores their creation over the course of the four-book series and the action is interrupted periodically by non-fiction chapters that break down real scientific topics. Written by biologist Jack Cohen and mathematician Ian Stewart, these asides tie into the narrative while educating the reader about everything from evolution to quantum mechanics.
The series had its origins in a meeting between Pratchett and Cohen at a science fiction convention in the Netherlands. At the time, Cohen was co-authoring a book about the evolution of the human intellect with Stewart. Cohen recalled in an interview that the two were having trouble getting “the chapters to gel” and asked Pratchett to advise them; later on, the trio got together at a Mongolian restaurant in Berlin, where Pratchett offered up some tips that made their way into the book’s final draft.
Since all three men were big sci-fi fans, the conversation soon turned to Star Trek. Specifically, they expressed a profound disappointment with Lawrence Krauss’s The Physics of Star Trek, a 1995 bestseller that offered insights on the TV show’s scientific underpinnings. The book did not impress Pratchett, Stewart, or Cohen, the latter of whom called it “bloody awful.” Still, Krauss’s project got Stewart thinking. “I raised the possibility of something similar related to Discworld,” he remembers. At first, the idea was shot down because, in his words, “there is no science in Discworld.”
Still, the concept seemed too good to throw away altogether—and after a while, the three men made a narrative breakthrough. “It took only a few months to find the obvious answer: since there was no science in Discworld, we had to put some there,” Stewart explains. “Instead of producing a scientific commentary on existing events in the Discworld canon, we had to write a fantasy/fact fusion in which an unfolding story of some wizardly brand of science was interlaced with a popular science book. Terry would have to tailor a genuine Discworld short story.”
Tailor one he did. Pratchett put together a 30,000-word short story that was seamlessly punctuated with essays that Stewart and Cohen authored. Once they finished the manuscript, Ebury publishing agreed to put out The Science of Discworld in 1999. Apparently, some company higher-ups didn’t like the book’s chances. “The editor there was made to understand that if it sold less than 10,000 copies, he’d lose his job. If it sold more than 25,000 it would be a miracle. It sold more than 200,000 copies in the first year,” Cohen recently told The Guardian. Three sequels were released between 2002 and 2013.
Discworld books have received plenty of accolades: The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents took home the Carnegie Medal in 2001; Night Watch won a Prometheus Award two years later; and Pyramids earned the 1989 British Science Fiction Award for best novel. In 2005, Pratchett’s bestseller Going Postal was nominated for a prestigious Hugo Award. The awards, handed out by the World Science Fiction Society, are seen as some of the highest honors that a sci-fi or fantasy writer can hope to attain. Multiple Hugo categories exist, with “best novel” being the one that usually attracts the most fanfare. (Past winners have included Frank Herbert’s Dune and American Gods by Neil Gaiman.)
Naturally, when an author receives a “best novel” nod, he or she generally doesn’t even consider withdrawing the book in question from Hugo consideration. But that’s exactly what Pratchett did in ’05. The WSFS selects its Hugo winners at Worldcon, the society’s annual convention. Pratchett was in attendance at the 2005 gathering and, as he later explained to his bewildered readers, he chose to pass on a potential best novel award for Going Postal because he felt the selection process would keep him from enjoying the Worldcon. Pratchett thus became only the third writer in history to take his book out of the running in this particular Hugo category. (In the past, authors Robert Silverberg and James Tiptree Jr., had done likewise.)
Great Britain is—for all intents and purposes—the birthplace of the modern fantasy genre. To celebrate this contribution to popular culture, the Royal Mail postage service company issued a set of eight commemorative stamps featuring some of the most popular fantastical characters to ever emerge from the UK, including Merlin and Morgan le Fay of Arthurian legend, Voldemort and Dumbledore from Harry Potter, and Aslan and the White Witch from Chronicles of Narnia. The Royal Mail didn’t forget about Discworld’s inhabitants: Rincewind rounded out the set along with the wise old witch Gytha “Nanny” Ogg.
In 2007, Pratchett announced that he’d been diagnosed with a kind of early onset Alzheimer’s disease. The disorder severely weakened Pratchett’s memory, rendered certain fonts unreadable, and took away his ability to type. But despite all those major setbacks, Pratchett kept on writing. Once he lost the capacity to operate a keyboard, the author started using voice recognition computer programs in their place. Pratchett dictated manuscripts for entire novels—including the Discworld books Snuff and Raising Steam—through this kind of software. “It really isn’t a problem,” he declared in a 2013 NPR interview. “I’m a bit of a techie anyway, so talking to the computer is no big deal. Sooner or later, everybody talks to their computers—they say, ‘You bastard!’”
Though He’s clad in dark robes and wields a scythe, the Death who appears in all but two Discworld novels isn’t your standard-order Grim Reaper. For one thing, He rides a white horse named Binky. He also likes physics, adores cats, and has a sort of benign fascination with the human experience. Unlike most literary embodiments of death, the figure who graces Discworld comes off as mild-mannered and somewhat compassionate. In 2004’s The Art of Discworld, Pratchett wrote about the fondness that many fans have expressed for the character. “Sometimes,” Pratchett wrote, “I get nice letters from people who know they’re due to meet [Death] soon, and hope I’ve got him right. Those are the kind of letters that cause me to stare at the wall for some time…”
On March 12, 2015, Pratchett died peacefully in his Broad Chalke home. In a way, Discworld’s Death helped announce the sad news to the world. The author had written a short story in the form of four planned tweets; when Pratchett died, his assistant Rob Wilkins logged onto the author’s Twitter account and posted them:
“AT LAST, SIR TERRY, WE MUST WALK TOGETHER. Terry took Death’s arm and followed him through the doors and on to the black desert under the endless night. The end.”
Five months after Pratchett’s death, the 41st entry in the Discworld series was published. The Shepherd’s Crown features the apparent demise of Granny Weatherwax, whose mentee, Tiffany Aching, is left to unite her fellow witches against a grave threat. According to Gaiman, Pratchett’s good friend and occasional collaborator, the novel was supposed to end with a poignant epilogue. “[It] would have made the book,” Gaiman told The Times, “but he never got to write it.”
The author of American Gods explained that, before Pratchett died, he’d had a conversation with the novelist about how The Shepherd’s Crown was going to wrap up. “When I talked to Terry about it, there was one little beautiful twist that would have made people cry,” Gaiman said. The big surprise involved Weatherwax and a cat named You. Apparently, Pratchett’s unwritten chapter would have revealed that the former didn’t actually die, she’d merely channeled her consciousness into the feline. “And there was going to be the final scene when she said, ‘I am leaving on my own terms now,’ and then Death turns up to take Granny Weatherwax for good,” Gaiman revealed.
“I’m allergic to Hollywood,” Pratchett once joked. So far, no Discworld novel has ever been adapted into a theatrically-released film. Still, this isn’t to say that nobody’s ever tried to make one. In 2006, Sony obtained the movie rights to The Wee Free Men, a Discworld story aimed at young adult readers. Evil Dead director Sam Raimi was set to direct, but the movie never passed the development phase because Pratchett wasn’t a fan of the script. “It contained everything that The Wee Free Men actually campaigns against,” he said. “Everything about [the book] was the opposite of Disney. But the studio had kind of Disneyfied it, to make it understandable to American filmmakers.”
Speaking of Disney, rumor has it that the directors of Aladdin were working on a movie version of Mort—the fourth Discworld book—as recently as 2011. Allegedly, the idea was shelved for some reason, which opened the door for another project called Moana.
Discworld may never have graced the silver screen, but a few novels have been adapted for other mediums. In 1990, playwright Stephen Briggs became the first person to ever dramatize one of Terry Pratchett’s novels when he wrote a stage adaptation of the Discworld book Wyrd Sisters for the Studio Theatre Club in Abingdon, Oxon. The show premiered in 1991, and it had no trouble finding an audience: Wyrd Sisters sold out almost instantly, as did Briggs’s subsequent adaptations of Men at Arms, Making Money, The Fifth Elephant, and many other Discworld classics. There have also been radio dramatizations of Discworld: Beginning in 1992, BBC Radio 4 aired six serials based on Guards! Guards!, Wyrd Sisters, Mort, Small Gods, Night Watch, and Eric.
Television has seen its fair share of Discworld stories, too. Sky Productions, for example, has released made-for-TV films based on Hogfather, The Colour of Magic, and Going Postal. And we may soon be in for a CSI-style Ankh-Morpork drama. Although Pratchett’s daughter, Rhianna, has declared that she’ll never give anyone—including herself—permission to write a new Discworld novel, she’s been working on an original “crime of the week” TV series that will follow Sam Vimes and his fellow city watchmen on some original adventures. Titled The Watch, the show’s development began in 2011 with Pratchett’s enthusiastic blessing.
January 27, 2017 – 6:00pm
Photographer Matt Emmett specializes in shooting abandoned buildings and other structures. There’s something eerie about knowing that these locations that exude total stillness and silence were once inhabited and lively, but there’s also a beauty and a crumbling majesty to many of the places he shoots.
January 25, 2017 – 7:00pm
January 23, 2017 – 11:55am
Don’t miss an episode—subscribe today! Images and footage provided by Shutterstock. Here’s a transcript courtesy of Nerdfighteria Wiki.
Hi I’m Elliott and this is Mental_Floss Video. Today I’m gonna talk about some misconceptions about various holidays and then I’m gonna go have a piña colada. I don’t know why I’m wearing this.
Believe it or not, Saint Patrick was born in modern day Britain in 390 CE, and he didn’t even identify as a Christian until the age of 16, which was around the time that he was sent to Ireland. So why do we celebrate St. Patrick’s Day as an Irish holiday? Well, he is the patron saint of Ireland because he converted many Irish people to Christianity when he was a priest and Irish immigrants in America started celebrating the holiday as early as 1762. In fact, the holiday’s often associated more with America more than Ireland where the holiday was a pretty minor affair until the 1970s, when I’m assuming they invented green beer.
John Adams once wrote to his wife, “I am apt to believe that [July 2, 1776], will be celebrated by succeeding generations, as the great anniversary festival.” And that was because July second was the day that the Second Continental Congress voted on the declaration, but it was officially approved on the fourth so that’s the day we celebrate, despite some founding fathers who preferred to celebrate on the second. If you want to celebrate when it was signed, you have to wait until August 2, and nobody wants to do that.
Actually, it was probably celebrated some time between September 21 and November 11. We know this because it was inspired by English harvest festivals which were typically celebrated in late September. Abraham Lincoln actually suggested the late November Thanksgiving, it officially became the fourth Thursday of November in 1941.
Nowadays it’s rare to find a scholar who will argue that Jesus was born on December 25, and many don’t even think he was born in the year 1 CE. It wasn’t until around 300 years after Jesus’s birth that people started celebrating Christmas in mid-winter, so it’s hard to believe that the date could be accurate. Plus, some scholars have pointed out that since there are shepherds in the story of Jesus’s birth in the Bible, it would make more sense if he was born in the spring. Even Pope Benedict the 16th wrote that Christmas is probably on the wrong date. December 25 might have been chosen because there was a Pagan celebration called Saturnalia that was celebrated around then. Others argue that it was chosen to be 9 months after Easter because there was a legend that Jesus was killed and conceived at the same time of year.
Actually this phenomenon has been studied extensively and the opposite was found to be true. Suicide rates are highest in the spring and summer according to studies conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Center for Health Statistics, and the Annenberg Public Policy Center. Experts aren’t sure why this is, but some believe it has something to do with the fact that people tend to interact more with others during the warmer months causing increased stress. Others claim that sunlight itself makes people more suicidal—but regardless, suicides do not increase during the winter holidays.
This is a widely reported statistic, but the biggest shopping day actually changes from year to year. For several years in the late 2000s, Black Friday was the largest, but in 2013, the Saturday before Christmas retook the crown. It varies widely but currently the momentum seems to be with that Saturday.
Toys similar to the dreidel existed in many ancient cultures long before Hanukkah was a holiday. It’s been connected to the Babylonian empire, India, and parts of Europe, and many people used it to gamble rather than celebrate religion. The story goes that in the ancient Seleucid empire, Jewish people adapted the toy into a method for secretly studying the Torah, and that’s why it’s now associated with Hanukkah.
There’s a popular myth on the internet that Easter is named after Ishtar who was the Babylonian goddess of fertility and sex. People say that the bunny was Ishtar’s symbol since they’re often associated with sex which is why we have an Easter bunny. Well, if you think about it, this makes no sense. The holiday of Easter has been around a lot longer than the English word Easter has, so really doesn’t make any sense at all. Experts claim that the word Easter probably comes from a Germanic goddess named Ostra and yes, the holiday of Easter was inspired by earlier pagan celebrations but there’s no evidence that Ishtar had anything to do with this, so stop bringing her into it.
Cinco de Mayo celebrates the day of the Battle of Puebla which occurred in 1862 when France was occupying part of Mexico. On May 5 of that year the Mexican army defeated the French army in the city of Puebla. Within five years the French no longer occupied Mexico. Mexican Independence Day is on September 16, by the way. It celebrates the start of the Mexican War of Independence against Spain in 1810.
A lot of people in the U.S. think that New Year’s is the most risky time to drive because there are more inebriated drivers on the road, and of course you should always be safe on the road and never drink and drive, but roads are typically more dangerous during summer holidays like the 4th of July and Memorial Day.
Thanks for watching Misconceptions on Mental_Floss video. If you have a topic for an upcoming Misconceptions episode that you would like to see, leave it in the comments. Also, apologies to the season of summer for giving it a bad rap in this video. And I’ll see you next week. I’m gonna go, uh, I’m gonna go change.
January 16, 2017 – 12:00am
January 9, 2017 – 10:15am
Friday, January 6, 2017 – 12:02
In the summer of 1844, King Frederick Augustus II of Saxony and his royal entourage were walking down Broad Street in the coastal town of Lyme Regis when they were drawn to the window of a cottage. Treasures lay on the other side of the glass: Coiled ammonite shells—long since turned to stone—were arranged in an appealing display, and in the center sat the petrified skull of a long-snouted sea reptile with pointed teeth and impossibly huge eyes.
A sign above the door read Anning’s Fossil Depot. The King and his party stepped inside.
There were Jurassic-era fossils throughout the small, unassuming shop, and yet, the single most fascinating thing in the store may well have been its proprietor, Mary Anning. She’d spent a lifetime simultaneously providing for her family and unlocking the secrets of Lyme Regis’s ancient past. Born into poverty in a society famed for its class consciousness, the 45-year-old businesswoman had defied the odds to become one of the world’s most important scientific figures.
Though Anning didn’t receive her due credit from the male naturalists who reaped the benefits of her labors, word of the fossil-hunter’s many achievements still managed to spread far and wide during her lifetime. So it was with complete honesty that this daughter of a poor carpenter casually told the King’s physician, “I am well known throughout the whole of Europe.” And years after her death, her legacy would live on in the English language’s most famous tongue twister: She sells seashells by the seashore.
The seashore where Anning’s shop was located was on the English Channel in southwestern England, in a town called Lyme Regis. With its towering cliffs and tannish-white beaches, Lyme Regis has long been a prime vacation destination. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, affluent Britons made it their seasonal home away from home. Meanwhile, the poorer citizens who lived in Lyme Regis year-round struggled to make ends meet.
Many supplemented their income by cashing in on the area’s natural history. Around 200 million years ago, the Lyme Regis area lay at the bottom of a Jurassic sea. In Anning’s time—and today—fossilized remains of marine animals from this period can be found protruding from the cliffs and scattered along the beaches that surround the coastal town. Realizing that rich tourists would pay a pretty penny to take home one of these natural curiosities, fossil hunters started selling their finds throughout Lyme Regis.
One of them was Mary’s father, Richard Anning, a carpenter by trade. But even with two revenue streams, he struggled to provide for his family, and their life was marked by tragedy. Richard’s wife, Molly, gave birth to their first child, Mary, in 1794, and a son, Joseph, in 1796. Mary died when she was just 4 after her dress caught on fire; Molly was pregnant with her third child at the time, and when she gave birth six months later, on May 21, 1799, she named the newborn girl Mary. A year later, the second Mary almost died as well when she, her nurse, and two female companions were struck by lightning while walking on the beach. All three women died, but Mary survived.
Of the Annings’ 10 children, only Mary and Joseph reached adulthood. As they grew up, Richard taught them everything he knew about the fossil-collecting business, and he even made Mary a rock hammer so she could excavate small fossils for herself.
Fossil hunting was a perilous job, and over the years, the Annings had many close calls with rockslides and rapidly flooding shorelines. That’s how Richard himself died in 1810. Out on an excursion that winter, he lost his footing and fell off a cliff. Months later, injuries sustained from the accident—coupled with a serious case of tuberculosis—claimed his life. He was 44 years old.
Following his death, Molly took charge of the family fossil shop, which basically consisted of a display table that the Annings would set up in front of their modest cottage near the River Lym. Keeping this business afloat was an economic necessity for Molly and her children—Richard had saddled them with a large debt.
The family struggled for a year until, in 1811, Joseph—who was working as a part-time upholsterer’s apprentice—discovered the 4-foot-long skull of an ancient marine reptile. Joseph and a hired team excavated the head, but Mary thought more bones might still be found. The following year, she returned to the site and proceeded to expose an entire spinal column, a set of ribs, and other bones.
Thrilled by her discovery, Mary recruited an excavation team of her own. As the creature’s remains were slowly removed from the rock, the group realized that they had a genuine sea monster on their hands: When it was reunited with its skull, the specimen measured an amazing 17 feet long.
The remains belonged to a dolphin-like animal that would later be called Ichthyosaurus, which means “fish-lizard.” Although the Annings did not discover the first known specimen of this genus (as some sources wrongly report), theirs was the most complete skeleton known at the time and therefore became the first to attract interest from Great Britain’s scientists. The fossil was sold to Henry Hoste Henley, the Lord of Colway Manor, for £23. That’s the equivalent of more than £1600 or $2000 in today’s money—enough to purchase six months of food for the Anning family.
The Annings’ ichthyosaur subsequently made its way to the British Museum, where, according to Hugh Torrens, a history of science professor at Keele University, “it aroused great interest as a denizen of the new world that the embryonic science of paleontology was beginning to reveal” [PDF]. When news of the sea dragon spread, the Annings—particularly Mary—became household names in Lyme Regis and beyond.
But fame has never guaranteed fortune. Even after the sale of Mary and Joseph’s ichthyosaur, the family remained in dire economic straits for nearly a decade. Thankfully, an 1820 charity auction thrown in their honor by the wealthy fossil-collector Thomas Birch helped give the Annings some much-needed financial stability.
In 1824, Mary Anning met Lady Harriet Silvester, a rich London widow who was blown away by the self-taught beachcomber’s paleontological expertise. “The extraordinary thing in this young woman,” Sylvester wrote in her diary, “is that she has made herself so thoroughly acquainted with the science that the moment she finds any bones she knows to what tribe they belong. She fixes the bones on a frame with cement and then makes drawings and has them engraved … It is certainly a wonderful instance of divine favour—that this poor, ignorant girl should be so blessed, for by reading and application she has arrived to that degree of knowledge as to be in the habit of writing and talking with professors and other clever men on the subject, and they all acknowledge that she understands more of the science than anyone else in this kingdom.”
As the 1820s unfolded, Mary took over the reins of the shop from her mother—and running the shop was just one of her obligations. She was also primarily responsible for acquiring its new fossils. Molly had never been one for collecting, and Joseph’s upholstery career was taking off. Combing the beaches, Mary came across many astonishing new specimens—including a few more Ichthyosaurus skeletons. As the Bristol Mirror reported in 1823, “This persevering female has for years gone daily in search of fossil remains of importance at every tide, for many miles under the hanging cliffs at Lyme, whose fallen masses are her immediate object, as they alone contain these valuable relics of a former world.” The publication also noted that it was “to her exertions we owe nearly all of the fine specimens of Ichthyosauri of the great collections.”
On December 10, 1823, Mary made the discovery of a lifetime. While scouring the beach in the shadow of Black Ven cliff, she came upon a fossilized skull that was like nothing she’d seen before. The majority of the skulls she had found belonged to Icthyosaurs; they were long and narrow, a bit like the heads of dolphins or crocodiles. This skull, on the other hand, was small, beady-eyed, and had a mouthful of strange, needle-shaped teeth.
Working with some nearby villagers, Anning unearthed the rest of the mystery creature’s body, which looked even stranger than the skull did. Attached to a stout torso and broad pelvis were four flippers and a diminutive tail. But the most peculiar thing about the animal was the long neck that accounted for nearly half of the 9-foot creature’s length.
Anning contacted one of the only men in Europe who might fully appreciate her find: the paleontologist Reverend William Buckland. In conversations about the newborn science of paleontology, she could hold her own with anyone, experts like Buckland included. The 24-year-old devoured every scrap of fossil-related news published in the scientific journals of her time; this autodidact even taught herself French so that she could read articles published in that language. This is how Anning knew that some paleontologists—including Buckland and Reverend William Conybeare—believed that a few fossil bones previously attributed to Ichthyosaurus really belonged to an as-yet-unidentified kind of marine reptile. Conybeare had even come up with a name for this new beast: Plesiosaurus.
In her letter to Buckland, Anning provided a detailed sketch of her newest discovery. “I may venture to assure you that it is the only [Plesiosaurus skeleton] discovered in Europe,” she told the scientist. This wasn’t an empty boast: Anning had indeed found the first articulated Plesiosaurus remains known to science. Prior to that, nobody had any idea about what this mysterious animal looked like. Once he finished reading Anning’s description, Buckland talked Richard Grenville, the first Duke of Buckingham, into buying the skeleton.
The animal’s proportions were so bizarre that some scientists cried foul. Upon seeing a copy of Anning’s sketch, the legendary French anatomist Baron Georges Cuvier was worried that the fossil was a hoax. In a letter to Conybeare, Cuvier suspiciously noted that “This discovery … surpasses all those that have been made so far [in Lyme Regis] and there is nothing more monstrous that one could expect to see” [PDF]. How could an animal with such an absurdly long neck possibly exist? The Baron was felt that it didn’t. Intensely skeptical of the find, Cuvier accused Anning of affixing a fossil snake’s head and vertebrae to the body of an Ichthyosaurus. However, when it later became clear that her specimen had in no way been tampered with, the anatomist was forced to eat his words.
At an 1824 Geological Society of London meeting, Conybeare stole the show with a well-received presentation on the nearly complete Plesiosaurus from Lyme Regis. That same year, he published a paper on the specimen featuring detailed original illustrations. Neither his presentation nor his paper mentioned Anning by name.
Conybeare was just one of many scientists who furthered their own careers by writing papers about fossils that Anning had found. They rarely gave her credit, and to make matters worse, she couldn’t publish her own findings in reputable journals because their editors didn’t accept submissions from women. (One man who did give her credit when it was due was—perhaps surprisingly—Cuvier. “I see, however, that a skeleton discovered by Mademoiselle Marie Anning on the coast of the county of Dorset, although only five feet long, has not been allowed to be related to this species,” he wrote in 1824.)
Nonetheless, institutionalized sexism didn’t prevent Mary from continuing to make major discoveries. In 1824, she unearthed the first pterosaur skeleton that had ever been found outside of Germany. Anning was also probably the first person to identify fossilized poop, or a coprolite. (Sadly, Buckland—a frequent correspondent of hers—would subsequently take credit for this scatological breakthrough.) By 1826, she had earned enough money from fossil sales to relocate her family to a cottage on upper Broad Street. The main room on the ground level became the Annings’ new store, complete with an attractive storefront window. It quickly emerged as a major tourist attraction, particularly for geology buffs. It hosted such celebrity visitors as Gideon Mantell, who, in 1825, had announced the discovery of Iguanodon, the first herbivorous dinosaur known to science.
But she was deprived of the formal recognition she longed for and deserved. Allegedly, when a young admirer penned a letter to Anning, she replied, “I beg your pardon for distrusting your friendship. The world has used me so unkindly, I fear it has made me suspicious of everyone” [PDF]. Anning would often confide in her good friend Maria Pinney, who once observed, “She says the world has used her ill and she does not care for it, according to her account these men of learning have sucked her brains, and made a great deal by publishing works of which she furnished the contents, while she derived none of the advantages.”
Through it all, Anning never stopped fossil-hunting, even though it remained a perilous business. Once, in 1833, Anning was nearly killed by a sudden landslide that crushed her beloved black-and-white terrier, Tray, who liked to accompany her on the beaches. “[The] death of my old faithful dog has quite upset me,” Anning told a friend. “The cliff that fell upon him and killed him in a moment before my eyes, and close to my feet … it was but a moment between me and the same fate.”
By the mid-1830s, Anning’s fortunes had begun to falter because of a bad investment. In 1835, Buckland, moved by her plight, talked the British Association for the Advancement of Science into granting Anning a £25 yearly annuity in honor of her outstanding contributions to paleontology. This kind gesture essentially amounted to the first significant acknowledgement by professional scientists of her achievements. Her bottom line in these lean years was bolstered by the occasional big purchase made by such fossil shop patrons.
The scientific community once again came to Anning’s aid when she was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1846. As soon as the Geologic Society learned of her diagnosis, its members began raising money to cover her medical expenses. Anning died on March 9, 1847. Her funeral was paid for by the Geological Society, which also financed a stained-glass window dedicated to her memory that now sits at St. Michael’s Parish Church in Lyme Regis.
Her amazing deeds were commemorated by Charles Dickens nearly two decades later. Though he probably never met Anning in person, the author of A Christmas Carol wrote a moving essay about her 18 years after she died. “Mary Anning, the Fossil Finder” ran in the February 1865 edition of his literary periodical All The Year Round. “Her history shows what humble people may do, if they have just purpose and courage enough, toward promoting the cause of science,” Dickens wrote. “The carpenter’s daughter has won a name for herself, and deserved to win it.”
You might not be familiar with Anning’s name, but you’ve certainly heard of her, even if you didn’t realize it. In 1908, songwriter Terry Sullivan—who penned a number of catchy ballads for British music halls—wrote a song widely believed to be about Anning’s life whose lyrics have since been recited by just about every English-speaking person on Earth:
“She sells seashells on the seashore,
The shells she sells are seashells, I’m sure,
For if she sells seashells on the seashore,
Then I’m sure she sells sea shore shells.”
And today, Anning—long overlooked by her contemporaries—is finally getting her due. The self-taught paleontologist is now a revered figure in paleontology circles. “More than anyone else at the time,” Hugh Torrens said, “she showed what extraordinary things could turn up in the fossil record.” The late evolutionary theorist Stephen Jay Gould shared this esteem for her. In his 1992 book Finders Keepers, Gould wrote that “Mary Anning [is] probably the most important unsung (or inadequately sung) collecting force in the history of paleontology.”
December 26, 2016 – 8:00am
