The Fossil Hunter: Dinosaurs, Evolution, and the Woman Whose Discoveries Changed the World
For weeks, two families, neighbors who lived just west of Lyme Regis, were growing alarmed by strange goings-on in their neck of town. One night, one family felt their cottage shifting a bit to the left. The next day, after looking around their garden, the other family spotted some fissures, even though everything else appeared pretty much as usual. Then, about a week later, a well-worn pathway seemed to be slightly askew, compared to where it had been before. Finally, a front door refused to close all the way, as it used to.
These families were living in two small cottages set high atop the Undercliff, a raised strip of land a half-mile wide abutting the cliff, covered with dense trees, rare plants, and a jungle of vegetation. Stretching seven and a half miles between Lyme Regis and Seaton, the rough terrain was grazed by cows and sheep, and was overrun with rabbits. The views of the sea were breathtaking, and, on a clear day, the inhabitants were even able to make out the outline of the French coast on the opposite side of the Channel, which is only 21 miles wide at its shortest stretch. This awesome vantage point was essential; the heads of both households made their livings as customs officers who watched for smugglers along the beach and out to sea.
But the shifts in the land surrounding their homes were starting to cast a dark cloud over their bucolic existence. Their growing worries came to a head on Christmas Eve 1839 when one of the families, the Critchards, discovered that parts of the steep and winding path to their house had sunk about a foot. That was all the impetus the two families needed to send them packing -- but just for one night. The next morning, Christmas Day, when they stopped by their properties for a look around, all seemed perfectly ordinary. Relieved, they decided to return home for the holiday. William Critchard reassured his nervous wife that, since the cottage had just been built two years ago, its foundation most likely was still simply settling.
By late Christmas night, many of the more affluent families of Lyme Regis had long finished off their geese and flaming plum puddings. William and Mary Buckland and their children probably savored one of the bigger celebrations; their family was staying in town for the holiday season, hoping to do a bit of fossil hunting and visit with local collectors, including Mary, before returning to Oxford. Buckland always liked to get as far away as possible from the university, and his untidy desk, during the winter break. By midnight, most everyone in town was tucked snugly into their beds, stomachs full, including the Critchards and the other custom official's family.
But the night was not to be a quiet one. Indeed, it wasn't long before the peace was shattered by an intense roar, accompanied by a violent movement of the earth. The families' beds swayed back and forth like pendulums, the windows rattled in their frames. Jolted from a deep sleep, the Critchards shot up, eyes wide, and looked around in horror. They couldn't believe it. The floor of their house was rising slowly up toward the ceiling, as if the whole place were closing in on itself. At the same time, the walls were cracking. All the while, noise was almost deafening. At first, they probably thought they were dreaming. Or perhaps they were suffering the ill effects of too much drink. But the Critchards and their neighbors knew enough not to take any chances. They were desperate to get out of there -- quickly.
They scrambled out, barely reaching a spot several steps inland before their cottages began slipping down the cliff. They watched as a lifetime of possessions disappeared into the darkness.
When the sun finally came up, the two terrified families finally were able to survey the damage. They had known the coastline was unstable and, certainly, debris had been propelled into the sea before. But never to such a great extent. This time the ground had literally moved underneath them, and they had lost everything.
This landslip was the biggest in recent memory in Britain, perhaps in the country's history. All told, it opened up a chasm three quarters of a mile long, nearly 150 feet deep, and 240 feet wide. By the time it was over, some 8 million tons of rock had split off from the crag and plunged 200 feet into the sea. Boulders the size of cows had broken off and careened toward the water. According to at least one historian, an entire orchard had been transplanted exactly as it had stood, to a spot lower down the cliff side.
That morning -- the Boxing Day holiday in England -- word spread fast. Soon most of the people of Lyme Regis, including Mary, her brother, and the Bucklands, were on site, creating a carnival atmosphere. People from neighboring hamlets began making their way over, eager to catch a glimpse of the pile of earth that had replaced a precipice high above the sea. Buckland and Mary scoured the scene, searching for fossils as well as any hint of what might have caused the landslip. Buckland would have ascribed the action to months of heavy rain, and he would have been right. Heavy rainfall had saturated the porous chalk cliffs common along this stretch of the shoreline as well as the thick layer of sandstone beneath. The cliffs had been so weakened that they could no longer support the overlying mass of heavy rocks. In recent weeks, the Undercliff on which the two families lived had started to slouch a bit, and then slouch a bit more before finally crumpling completely in the landslip, opening up a yawning canyon as vast amounts of land stumbled into the sea. So much rock was displaced that the movement threw up a section of the seabed a mile long and some 40 feet high, creating a ridge, or reef, that ran parallel to the shore and enclosed a natural harbor about 25 feet deep. In the years to come, though, this soft sandstone ridge would be completely eroded and washed away.
When Conybeare received word of the landslip, he hastened over from Axminster, joining Buckland and Mary at the scene. The trio spent a great many hours that week going over the catastrophic happenings as they picked through the displaced soil, sand, and chalk, seeking out new treasures. Mary was riveted by the event but lamented the fact that it did not lead to the finding of any unique fossils. She had been sure it would. Around her, though, was a dense phalanx of fossil seekers, scouring the ruins of what had once been a cliff, all looking to her for inspiration, and that counted for something.
The landslip aroused enormous curiosity throughout Lyme Regis and elsewhere. The idea that a landscape could change so dramatically in a heartbeat, right before one's eyes, fired the public's imagination. A few enterprising farmers even began charging to show visitors around the site. Some people visited by paddle steamer, and later a piece of music, the "Landslide Quadrille," was composed to commemorate the event. Even the young Queen Victoria came to survey the spectacle, albeit only from the bay, arriving on her royal yacht from the Isle of Wight. In the end, the landslip was another important reminder of the unpredictable whims of erosion, with cliffs forming over centuries of time or, as in the case of the landslip, in an instant.
After the drama of 1839, the arrival of a new decade probably was something of a quiet letdown. Time passed as it normally did, slowly and monotonously. It wasn't that Mary wouldn't have had anything to keep her busy. In addition to running her fossil shop and caring for her home, she continued her almost daily forays along a foreshore -- the most seaward part of the beach -- that extended for several miles. She also spent many a day indoors, preparing fossils for shipment to London, Oxford, and other cities. Weeks of careful and precise work were involved in removing the overlying rock from the surface of a skeleton. Mary's main tools continued to be a hammer and chisel. She would have repaired broken bones with animal glue and strengthened weak bones with acacia gum. She would have built wooden frames on which to adequately display and transport the skeletons, possibly by this time using plaster to .ll in any gaps. In addition, Mary would have spent time reading dispatches from her many far-off friends. But by now visits from the learned gentlemen were becoming less frequent.
As the new director of London's young and very small Museum of Economic Geology, Henry De la Beche was busy worrying over the lack of space. At the same time, William Conybeare was relishing his new appointment as Bampton lecturer at Oxford, where he was charged with delivering a series of lectures on Christian theological topics. William Buckland, too, was preoccupied with plans for a geological tour of Scotland. And so, in the fall of 1840, Mary was pleased to be able to offer her assistance to Louis Agassiz by shipping off a few more fossil fish for him to examine, at his request.
Agassiz was in Britain that year to attend a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, at which he talked up the controversial evidence he'd gathered in support of his idea of an Ice Age. Afterward, a skeptical Roderick Murchison wrote: "..." Mary's fossil fish later would help Agassiz as he mapped out the Rhaetic Bed, a layer of older rock lying beneath the Blue Lias. This was no small contribution; Mary's fish and Agassiz's mapping later helped scientists identify various kinds of ocean creatures that had lived tens of millions of years ago, long before even the dinosaurs.
By this time, Mary was well acquainted with the various modes of transportation available for shipping fossil finds to scientists and buyers. Generally she sent larger specimens by ship from the harbor; the preferred method for shipping smaller items was transport by any willing visitors to Lyme Regis. In one of her last correspondences with Adam Sedgwick, in 1843, Mary said she was sending off the "platydon head" to London by "wagon railroad," the covered wagons used for freight and transportation before the railroad was introduced. Although the London and South Western Railway had been launched in 1838, the first railway did not reach Axminster, some four miles from Lyme Regis, until 1859.
In the early 1840s, Mary was settling into a quiet satisfaction with her life, assured of a steady income and an abiding relationship with God to keep her company. Her deep religious faith would have been great comfort to her when, in early October 1842, her mother, Molly, died from unknown causes, possibly in her sleep. Although she had been in declining health for some time, Molly had been reasonably active until her death at 78.
There are some indications that Molly had always been a bit bemused by her daughter's aspirations, but the two had been constant presences in each other's life, and Molly had shared in Mary's every success and failure. Visitors to Mary's fossil shop later recalled a very old woman wearing a mop cap and a large white apron, somewhat timid, patiently helping customers and gladly showing children around.
Molly once described her daughter as "a history and a mystery" -- a strange characterization from the person who knew Mary best. Molly, who had married young, probably never grasped her daughter's desire to be recognized, to be independent, to make a name for herself within a rigidly stratified society in which there was bound to be no place for her. Initially Molly had chastised her husband and her daughter for their foolhardy passion for fossil hunting, considering it a waste of precious time. She accepted Mary's choice of occupations only grudgingly, after realizing it offered the family its best, perhaps only, chance of earning a steady income.