FOSSIL RECORD

This novel is based on the life of one of the 19th century's first and most significant fossil hunters. Mary Anning (1799–1847) was an uneducated working-class woman, living on the edge of poverty in a culture in which social standing, wealth, education, and gender set the boundaries of a strict caste system. All this worked against her receiving the kind of acknowledgment and acclaim that she deserved. She discovered plesiosaurs, ichthyosaurs, and other fossils that turned early-19th-century assumptions inside out. Not only did she find and excavate the fossils, she recognized them as being different from any living creatures or previously discovered fossils. This was an era when the Church of England was still steadfastly sticking to Bishop Ussher's proclamation that the world was created in 4004 BC. Such a short history implied that the world and the organisms in it had changed very little or not at all from...