The Fossil Hunter

Learned a great deal more about Dinos. Amazed that such a world existed and the huge variety of animals that lived at that time. All done by dedicated people with logic and simple tools and the daring to lose their life in their pursuits. Sad that Mary was not given the true recognition that she deserved except for a few truly noble men who learned from her. Also I wonder what put an end to the era. I highly recommend this book to young and old alike. Bob

I was really excited to read this book as Mary Anning is a fascinating figure and fossil hunting & geology is a topic I very much enjoy. However, as several other reviewers have mentioned, the book is not written very well. The word “probably” seems to appear at least twice (often more) on nearly every page. Other speculative words and phrases such as “would have,” “might have,” are so overly used that it becomes irritating to read after a certain point, and a becomes a huge distraction to the story. I just counted and on pages 162 & 163 the words “probably, perhaps, maybe or might have” occur at a combined total of at least 13 times and are being used in a speculative manner. That is 13 times on 2 pages! It makes it very difficult to get through the book.

Also, as others mentioned, it is very repetative & biased, so much so, that on more than one occassion I got confused thinking I must have gotten my pages mixed up and was re-reading a previous page.

I appreciate the enthusiasm for Mary Anning on the part of the author, but I unfortunately wouldn’t recommend this book.

This is a well-written story about an unknown 19th fossil hunter and uneducated paleontologist, Mary Anning. The book is a helpful introduction to the launch of paleontology – and the men of means who accepted only their gender among their rank. Also describes how Mary Anning’s findings inspired the science of evolution. A quick yet very informative read.

I really enjoyed this biography of one of my favorite historical figures. Id read the engaging historical fiction by Tracey Chevalier about her – Mary Anning – but I wanted her whole story, in greater detail, and this excellent non-fiction telling was excellent!

I recently read Tracy Chevalier’s newest book Remarkable Creatures, the story of Mary Anning, a woman I had never heard of but is getting the attention she so richly deserved. I enjoyed Remarkable Creatures so much I was very happy to learn of this biography of her life. For anyone who doesn’t normally like nonfiction I would recommend this book, it is written in a very accessible style and the story is so astonishing it reads like fiction. Emling has written a book that I found easy to read and hard to put down.

Mary Anning was born in 1799 and lived in the Lyme Regis area of England her entire life; she learned to fossil hunt as a small child, at that time a fossil was anything dug out of the ground, most of Mary’s fossils finds were ammonites. Living on the very edge of poverty and barely literate she became one of the most renowned paleontologists of her time. At the age of 11 she found the first entire fossil skeleton of an ichthyosaur; a fossil that is still on display in the Natural History Museum in London. This find was the first step in the eventual theory of evolution by Darwin, who used Mary’s finds and works extensively in his Origin of the Species.

The fact that Mary found this one specimen would be pretty astonishing, but she also discovered the first complete plesiosaurus, the first pterosaur (pterodactyl), a new fossil fish (Squaloraja), along with many other smaller finds. With all this she is barely known today and was often overlooked or not credited during her lifetime – most likely because she was a woman and the scientific community at that time was male dominated. Although she had many well known friends in the geological world during her lifetime she was never accorded the accolades, respect or monetary earnings these men achieved. She died at the age of 48, from breast cancer, and is largely unknown today. Although most of us have recited the `She sells sea shells on the seashore’ tongue twister how many of us knew it was written about this amazing woman? A very good read and one I would recommend to anyone wishing to learn about the first baby steps of understanding evolution.

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