A love for Jane Austen is a good enough reason to visit Lyme Regis. The coastal town plays a prominent role in Persuasion. It is a place Austen visited more than once more than ten years prior to writing the novel. It gives you a sense of the kinds of seaside resort towns Austen mocked in Sanditon, as well.
But there’s another important reason to visit Lyme Regis (which I’ll note as LR after this). It’s on the Jurassic Coast. It’s the home of Mary Anning. You can still find fossils on the rocky beaches–many of which are next to dramatic cliffs. Did I mention you can find fossils from the Jurassic Period? 😀
As you know from my last post, I visited LR primarily for the opportunity to walk The Cobb breakwater. When I found out that LR was home to Mary Anning (1799-1847) and that the very cliffs of LR still contain ancient fossils and is open to visitors, I knew I had to add an extra day to my trip. I had to go be a Mary Anning.
You know Mary Anning, even if you don’t. “She sells sea shells by the sea shore” is supposedly about Mary Anning, who with her family sold shells and fossils in a LR shop. Mary is the “she” of the limmerick. But she was more than that whimsical “she.” She was a paleontologist in a time when women weren’t allowed to be paleontologists. She was denied entry into the Geological Society of London even though she discovered the plesiosaur and ichthyosaur, among other prehistoric sea creatures. Men took credit for these finds, too.
Mary was a freakin dinosaur fossil finder! And once she found those creatures previously unknown to the world, she became a fossil hunter! She found large ancient sea creatures’ remains as well as fossils of ammonites and other small organisms, which is what tourists hope to find on the beaches of the Jurassic Coast.
A friend on Facebook once posted pictures of the fossils they found on a trip to LR, and I couldn’t believe this was a possibility. Like, how could an average person just find ancient fossils on a public beach? No way! Yes way! So I knew that is what Lacy, Kensington, and I would do when we went to England. We’d wrap up our London and Jane Austen trip as fossil hunters!
We started our fossil day with a walk to the Mary Anning statue and a trip to the Lyme Regis Museum, which is in part devoted to Anning’s findings. Here’s the statue:
What a lovely bronze statue! It’s only three years old! You might notice that it is covered in ammonites and that on the base you see the impression of an ichthyosaur skull. It also features Mary’s dog, Tray, who was killed in an 1833 landslide that almost killed Mary, too.
I read up on Anning before traveling to LR because I’m fascinated by this trailblazer! And she was alive during Austen’s lifetime, so that’s a cool thing to note. Austen died in 1817. Anning was 12 in 1811 when she found her first prehistoric creature! Sadly, Anning died at 47 from breast cancer. Yeah. That hits home.
But back to our day. Here are some of the cool things we saw at the museum:
Are you seeing what I’m seeing? That drawing for the Carboniferous Period looks like an axolotl. In the Jurassic column you see the creatures Mary found. Below is what you can see in the Mary Anning room:
The museum is worth visiting for this one room alone, but I really enjoyed everything in the museum (and there is some Austen stuff). It’s a must-visit if you go to LR. In the photos you see the range of creatures Anning is known for discovering as well as some large specimens of the smaller fossils people might still find on the beach. The last two pics might not convey how large the fossils are, but they are huge. Look at the pics of Kensington and me for a sense of scale.
After we looked at the museum we were ready for our fossil walk tour. As it turns out, this “walk” wasn’t much of a walk where a tour guide shows you things. It was a lecture and show-and-tell outside of the museum, a walk to the Anning statue, and then a walk to the beach where people were told to start finding fossils. Eek. Beforehand my sister bought us some fossil hunting tools, which we actually didn’t need, but we had them and left them at the AirBnB cuz you can’t take them home in your carry-on!
Here are some pics of the tour before we began hunting:
Our tour guide was knowledgeable about Anning and the fossils he had, but he didn’t do a great job of showing us how to find fossils ourselves. That is why by the time we got to the beach and were told good luck, I was feeling a bit lost.
We spent at least four hours squatting on the beach, sitting on large rocks, and hunched over turning over rocks and digging for fossils. By the end of that day I don’t think I found anything. Lacy and Kensington found a few small and mostly incomplete samples. I felt defeated. It sounded like even an idiot could find ammonite fossils. Why couldn’t I? Well, that’s because I didn’t know what to look for. Thanks, Casey (tour guide). The next morning I would do better.
In the next blog post I’ll share some pics from the first day on the beach and our second morning return.
If you like Anning and ammonites, give this post a like!
Misty Krueger 
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