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The Fossil Hunter of Lyme Regis — lesson illustration Standard

PEOPLE & HISTORY

The Fossil Hunter of Lyme Regis

  • 10 spell
  • 7 known
  • 2 semi-open
  • 5 open
  • 2 math
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A SKULL IN THE CLIFF

In 1811, Joseph Anning spotted a long, toothy skull weathering out of a cliff at Lyme Regis, a small town on the Dorset coast of England. His sister Mary, then about twelve, returned to the spot and over months of careful digging freed the rest of the SKELETON from the rock. It was an ICHTHYOSAUR, a long-snouted marine reptile that was neither fish nor CROCODILE. The cliffs there are Blue Lias, a banded stack of LIMESTONE and shale laid down under an ancient sea.

  1. SPELL
    ICHTHYOSAUR
  2. SPELL
    CROCODILE
  3. KNOWN
    Over months of careful digging, Mary freed the rest of what from the rock?
    Answer: SKELETON
  4. KNOWN
    Those cliffs are a banded stack of shale and what other rock, laid down under an ancient sea?
    Answer: LIMESTONE
  5. OPEN
    Mary spent months chipping the skeleton free of the rock. What would be the hardest part of work like that?

READING THE CLIFF

Anning did not simply dig; she waited for the coast to hand things over. Fossils sat locked in MATRIX, the hard rock encasing a SPECIMEN, and only the cliff's own destruction released them. Winter STORMS battered the cliff face, LANDSLIDES dropped whole slabs onto the beach, WAVES scoured the fallen debris, and FROST split the shale along its BEDDING. She learned to read the STRATA, the stacked layers of rock each recording a different moment of the old seafloor, and to chisel a specimen free without shattering it.

  1. SPELL
    BEDDING
  2. SPELL
    SPECIMEN
  3. KNOWN
    What is the term for the hard rock that encases a fossil and has to be chipped away to free it?
    Answer: MATRIX
  4. KNOWN
    What is the term for the stacked layers of rock, each one recording a different moment of the old seafloor?
    Answer: STRATA
  5. SEMI-OPEN
    Name two of the forces that broke the cliffs open and exposed the fossils.
    Needs 2 of: STORMS, LANDSLIDES, WAVES, FROST
  6. OPEN
    When frost splits a slab of shale open on the beach, what would you hope to find inside?

SCIENCE FORCED TO REVISE ITSELF

What came out of those cliffs kept forcing science to revise itself. In 1823 Anning uncovered a nearly complete PLESIOSAUR, a long-necked marine reptile so unlike anything alive that the French anatomist Georges CUVIER first suspected a forgery, then conceded it was genuine. In 1828 she found Britain's first PTEROSAUR, a flying reptile. She recognized that stony lumps inside ICHTHYOSAUR skeletons were fossilized dung — each lump a COPROLITE still holding scales and bone. BELEMNITE fossils she prepared kept their ink sacs. Animals with no living match made EXTINCTION hard to deny.

  1. SPELL
    COPROLITE
  2. SPELL
    CUVIER
  3. KNOWN
    What is the term for a kind of animal dying out completely, with none left alive anywhere?
    Answer: EXTINCTION
  4. SEMI-OPEN
    Name two of the ancient animals Anning recovered from the Lias cliffs.
    Needs 2 of: PLESIOSAUR, PTEROSAUR, ICHTHYOSAUR, BELEMNITE
  5. OPEN
    Cuvier called the skeleton a forgery and then had to admit it was real. When has something looked impossible to you and turned out true?

CREDIT WITHHELD

Finding was not the same as being credited. The gentlemen geologists who bought her specimens described them in scientific journals, often without naming her, so the papers that made those animals famous carried other people's names. The GEOLOGICAL Society of London, which several of those men led, would not admit a woman as a member, and did not for decades after her death in 1847. Anning was also poor and a DISSENTER, a Protestant outside the Church of England. A small ANNUITY, a yearly payment arranged by scientific friends, kept her working.

  1. SPELL
    DISSENTER
  2. SPELL
    ANNUITY
  3. KNOWN
    The London society that studied rocks and fossils refused to admit women. What was its field, as given in its name?
    Answer: GEOLOGICAL
  4. OPEN
    They arranged her yearly payment and still left her name off their papers. What is something you would want credit for, even if the money came anyway?
  5. MATH
    Mary Anning died in 1847, and the Geological Society of London first admitted women as fellows in 1919. How many years passed between those two dates?
    Answer: 72

THE COAST TODAY

If you go down to the beach below those cliffs today, you are on the JURASSIC Coast, a stretch of English SHORELINE protected for the rock record it exposes, and after a storm loosens the shale you can still pick up an AMMONITE, the coiled shell of an extinct sea animal. The habit of asking who actually found a specimen owes something to her case; museum labels name collectors now. Her fossils sit in major collections, and modern lists of influential British scientists include her, well over a century after she was refused a seat.

  1. SPELL
    AMMONITE
  2. SPELL
    SHORELINE
  3. KNOWN
    That protected stretch of English coastline, kept safe for the rock record its cliffs expose, is named after which geological period?
    Answer: JURASSIC
  4. OPEN
    What would you want to know about the animal that grew an ammonite shell?
  5. MATH
    Ammonites swam through the Jurassic Period, which began about 201 million years ago and ended about 145 million years ago. How many millions of years long was that period?
    Answer: 56

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