Mary Anning (58) (Little People, BIG DREAMS)

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develop rich content across the time periods, through which learners can develop an understanding of chronology through exploring … the use of evidence. They say I was a dull child before, but that after the lightning strike, I was bright. Like the lightning itself had gone into me and brought me fully to life. Tracy Chevalier's novel about Mary Anning is also about another woman--the genteel older woman Elizabeth Philpot. Despite the class and age differences between the two women, they became close friends as they shared their passion for collecting fossils. So this is not only a story about a woman who made invaluable contributions to science, but a story about the bond of friendship between two women. It's difficult to know where to start my story, because the truth is I was born once and then, when I was just 15 months old, still a baby, I had my second beginning.

I have experienced a range of stimuli, and had opportunities to participate in enquiries, both collaboratively and with growing independence.I wish I had read this book, or learned something about Mary Anning, before I went to London. I saw her picture and the fossils she discovered at the Natural History Museum in London without ever realizing what a remarkable accomplishment it was. She was a poor, uneducated, working class girl whose family survived by selling "curies" (curiosities), small fossils found on the beach in Lyme Regis. She finds what she considers crocodiles with fins, but are really the first pterodactyl and ichthyosaurus discovered. If these had been uncovered by an educated or upper class man, he would have enjoyed fame and fortune. But, unmarried women in the early 1800s had little voice and no respect. Matthew, H. C. G.; Harrison, B., eds. (23 September 2004). "The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (onlineed.). Oxford University Press. pp.ref:odnb/568. doi: 10.1093/ref:odnb/568 . Retrieved 30 November 2019. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.) It was like an itch or a twitch, just knowing that there were fossils out there waiting to be discovered.

Cole, Sheila (2005), The Dragon in the Cliff: A Novel Based on the Life of Mary Anning, iUniverse.com, ISBN 978-0-595-35074-2 Here's an animated sequence my friend Jill found of dialog from the historical novel Curiosity, by Joan Thomas, contrasting the perspectives of a typical 19th century Englishman with French naturalist and zoologist Georges Cuvier who doubted Anning's findings.There is only so much I care to read about the spinster sisters' genteel poverty (well, somewhat reduced circumstances by London standards) and which one wore which turban to what dance. The same goes for Mary's extremely poor family living in dire circumstances. I began to feel as if the story were being padded, not that I was learning anything new. Norman, David B. (1999), "Mary Anning and her times: the discovery of British palaeontology (1820–1850)", Trends Ecol. Evol. (published November 1999), vol.14, no.11, pp.420–421, doi: 10.1016/S0169-5347(99)01700-0, PMID 10511714 Fradin, Dennis B. (1997), Mary Anning: The Fossil Hunter (Remarkable Children), Silver Burdett Press, ISBN 978-0-382-39487-4 Some details are extremely fictional—there’s no indication that Mary’s mother, Molly, ever set foot on the beach or ever searched for a fossil. She was only reluctantly won over to fossil selling as a way of earning cold, hard cash. I know Mary’s dog, Tray, was killed in a landslide, but I don’t think that Mary herself was caught in it (although it made good, dramatic sense in this version). I also wish that Chevalier had captured more clearly the intellectual achievements of Mary and the expertise that she drew on to educate many of the fossil-hunting men who came to her for assistance. There was definitely an auction by Lieutenant-Colonel Birch to fund the Anning family, but no indications that it was Elizabeth who shamed him into it or that he was romantically involved with either woman. Soon after, Anning’s brother uncovered what he believed to be a crocodile skull. Anning, at 12 years old, found the rest of the skeleton, which turned out to be not a crocodile but an Ichthyosaurus, a “fish-lizard”—a crucial discovery in the field of paleontology. In The Fossil Hunter, a 2009 biography of Anning, author Shelley Emling writes that the skeleton of this reptile was an even greater discovery than the skull: “Eventually news spread far and wide that a young girl from Lyme Regis had made an incredible find: an entire connected skeleton of a creature never before seen.”