She sells she shells on the seashore. She sells seashells on the seashore. I was often stuck on this first line that I didn’t even attempt the rest of the tongue twister: 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 seashore shells. Although I didn’t much like pronunciation challenges, I found the story behind this one quite intriguing. Who was she? Where was the seashore? And why would people buy seashells on the seashore – I’ve never seen a stall dedicated to selling beach comb bounty by the coast!
A fossil collector, dealer, and pioneering palaeontologist is said to be the inspiration behind this famous seashell-seashore tongue twister. Her name was Mary Anning and she lived in Lymes Regis, United Kingdom in the early 19th century. She began searching for fossils along the cliffs of the English Channel in the county of Dorset in Southwest England as a young child alongside her father, Richard Anning. Richard was a carpenter and cabinet maker, but supplemented his income by mining the seashore and selling any curious fossil finds, or curios as they were called back then, to tourists. Popular curios were assigned peculiar names and sometimes believed to have healing or mystical properties. For example, ammonite fossils were known as snake-stones due to the coiling shape of the shell, belemnite fossils were called devil’s fingers because of the sharp conical shape of the animal’s internal bone, and vertebrae fossils were affectionately called verteberries.
Fortunately for science, Mary continued in the curios trade after her father died when she was just twelve years old. Her intelligence and curiosity eventually led to many important discoveries which paved the way for palaeontology to become a branch of science in its own right.
Her first notable discovery was made shortly after her father’s death. Joseph Anning, her brother, found a skull of an animal and asked Mary to locate the rest of the skeleton. She found the entire skeleton a few months later. The fossil, which was ~6.4 m in length, attracted the attention of the scientific community and was later identified as an ichthyosaur, a large extinct reptile. Mary continued to make discoveries of fossils of extinct animals, including the Plesiosaurus (marine reptile), Pterosaur (flying reptile), Squaloraja (fish thought to be a member of transition group between rays and sharks), and Dapedium politum (ray-finned fish). Together, these fossils provided compelling evidence for extinction. The concept had been proposed by Georges Cuvier in the late 1790s, citing mammoth fossils as an example. However, creationism was the accepted norm of the time, so people believed that species didn’t appear nor go extinct; fossils of strange and unknown species were simply of animals that were living in places on Earth that were yet to be discovered.
In order to better understand the fossil specimens she collected, Mary taught herself anatomy by dissecting modern day animals . This enabled her to draw inferences about the link between creatures past and present. For example, Mary discovered a chamber of dried ink inside a belemnite fossil in 1826. Her friend, Elizabeth Philpot, ended up retrieving the ink and using it to make illustrations of ichthyosaur fossils. Mary pointed out that the fossilised ink chambers of belemnite resembled those of present-day squid and cuttlefish. Mary was also the first to suggest that oddly shaped fossils in the abdominal region of ichthyosaurs, known as bezoar stones at the time, were fossilised faeces, now referred to as coprolites. She noticed that some of these fossils would contain fossilised fish bone and scales, and sometimes even small ichthyosaurs. After further investigation by William Buckland, an academic at The University of Oxford, these conclusions were published and presented to the Geological Society of London.
William gave Mary full credit for her discoveries, unlike other scientists who presented her fossils and ideas but did not mention her at all. She became embittered by this and lived an impoverished life, selling curios from the cliffs of the English Channel to barely make a living. Nevertheless, her talents and contribution have not gone unnoticed and she is recognised as a pioneering palaeontologist today. Her story has also entered mainstream culture through the famous seashell-seashore tongue twister, a movie starring Kate Winslet as Mary, and countless children’s books (including the little people big dreams series).
Cloudpot 