Review: Remarkable Creatures

It's been a while since I posted a review; the end of the semester has been crazy.

I recently finished Remarkable Creatures by Tracy Chevalier (better known for Girl with the Pearl Earring), and I loved it!

This is the story of Mary Anning, a female(!) fossil hunter in the early 1800s. Mary was one of the first to discover an icthyosaur specimen, and was the first to discover a plesiosaur.

Portrait of Mary Anning with her dog Tray
and the Golden Cap outcrop in the background,
Natural History Museum, London

This is all the more remarkable because she had little education and lived in a poor family; she learned fossil hunting from her father, who hunted fossils to raise money to support the family.

The story is told through the lens of Mary's friendship with Elizabeth Philpot, an upper class "spinster" who also enjoys fossil hunting. According to the book, Elizabeth plays an important role in helping Mary get the recognition she deserved from the scientific community.

Autograph letter concerning the discovery
of plesiosaurus, from Mary Anning

This book combined my interest in paleontology with my interest in interesting women, so it was a pretty easy sell for me. It lived up to my hopes; it was a really interesting look at early fossil collecting, and touched on the clash between religious beliefs and the dawning understanding of what fossils really were, and how that challenged existing beliefs. It also gave some incite into the issues women of that era, both in the lower and middle classes, faced.

I am not sure the portrayal of Mary was quite as well developed as it could have been; at times she felt a little two dimensional and the intelligence she must have possessed didn't shine through as well as I might have liked.

However, I thought it was overall an interesting look at the woman and the time period, as well as the development of paleontology. It also indirectly touched on the tension between educated experts and amateurs who develop expertise through their own explorations, which is something else that interests me. I wonder how Mary Anning would be received by the scientific community today?