Dorset’s unstable cliffs have claimed many lives

From The Road to Little Dribbling: Adventures of an American in Britain by Bill Bryson. Page 147.

Dorset’s unstable cliffs have claimed many lives and a good deal of property over the years. One notable casualty was Richard Anning, who tumbled over a cliff in Lyme in 1810 and never got up again. Anning himself isn’t remembered now, but his daughter Mary is. She was just ten when her dad died, leaving the family in poverty, but Mary almost immediately embarked on a long career of excavating and selling fossils that she found along the sea strand. She is commonly credited with being the person referred to in the tongue-twister ‘She sells seashells by the seashore.’

To say that Mary Anning had an affinity for excavation is to put it mildly. In a career of more than thirty years she found the first British pterodactyl, the first complete plesiosaurus and the finest ichthyosaurus. These were not the kind of fossils you could stick in your handbag. The ichthyosaurus was seventeen feet long. Excavating them took years of delicate, patient toil. The plesiosaur alone occupied ten years of her life. Anning not only extracted with the utmost skill, but provided lucid descriptions and first-rate drawings, and in consequence enjoyed the respect and friendship of many of the period’s leading geologists and natural historians. But because important finds were rare and the work slow, she spent most of her life in straitened circumstances, if not downright poverty. The house where she lived is now the site of the local museum, and it is, let me say at once, a perfect little institution. If you go to Lyme Regis, don’t miss it.

The other memorable thing about Mary Anning, incidentally – though there wasn’t anything incidental about it to those around her – was that she seemed a remarkably unlucky person to be close to. In addition to her father tumbling over a cliff, one of her sisters died in a house fire and three other siblings were killed by a lightning strike. Mary, sitting right beside them, was miraculously spared.