Remarkable Creatures - Book Review

Remarkable Creatures
by Tracy Chevalier
Dutton Books 2010


As mentioned in previous posts, I have finally been able to read this book, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.




Along the coast of Southwest England is an area called the Jurassic Coast. It has been given this name for the many fossils found on these beaches. One of the towns along this coast is called Lyme Regis in Dorset.

The story begins around the year 1812. The southern English coast brims with fossils for those who can find them. From the moment she's struck by lightning as a baby, it is clear Mary Anning is marked for greatness. When she uncovers unknown dinosaur fossils in the cliffs near her home, she sets the scientific world alight, challenging ideas about the world's creation and stimulating debate over our origins.

In an arena dominated by men, however, Mary Anning is soon reduced to a serving role, facing prejudice from the academic community, vicious gossip from neighbours, and the heartbreak of forbidden love. Even nature is a threat, throwing bitter cold, storms, and landslips at her.

Luckily Mary finds an unlikely champion in prickly, intelligent Elizabeth Philpot, a middle-class spinster who is also fossil-obsessed. Their relationship strikes a delicate balance between fierce loyalty and barely suppressed envy. Despite their differences in age and background, Mary and Elizabeth discover that, in struggling for recognition, friendship is their strongest weapon.

Remarkable Creatures is Tracy Chevalier's stunning novel of how one woman's gift transcends class and gender to lead to some of the most important discoveries of the nineteenth century.

It is also said that Charles Darwin could not have written the Origins of Species if Mary Anning had not made her fossil discoveries.

I am proud that a large number of my ancestors came from the West Country, where the Jurassic Coast area is located. However they were not fossil hunters.

There is another recent novel about Mary Anning available as well. Curiosity. I have this on reserve at the library.

Update on Mary Anning - Fossil Hunter

Several weeks ago I mentioned Mary Anning who was a fossil hunter in England on the mid 1800s. I also mentioned how I wanted to read Tracy Chevalier's novel, Remarkable Creatures, about Mary Anning and her fossil hunting discoveries. I do have Remarkable Creatures on reserve at the library but it still hasn't arrived yet.

Well I have just discovered another new book (due to be published next week - March 30) about Mary Anning. It's called CURIOSITY by Joan Thomas.

Award-winning novelist Joan Thomas blends fact and fiction, passion and science in this stunning novel set in 19th-century Lyme Regis, England.

More than 40 years before the publication of The Origin of Species, 12-year-old Mary Anning, a cabinet-maker's daughter, found the first intact skeleton of a prehistoric dolphin-like creature, and spent a year chipping it from the soft cliffs near Lyme Regis. This was only the first of many important discoveries made by this incredible woman, perhaps the most important paleontologist of her day.

Henry de la Beche was the son of a gentry family, owners of a slave-worked estate in Jamaica where he spent his childhood. As an adolescent back in England, he ran away from military college, and soon found himself living with his elegant, cynical mother in Lyme Regis, where he pursued his passion for drawing and painting the landscapes and fossils of the area. One morning on an expedition to see an extraordinary discovery — a giant fossil — he meets a young woman unlike anyone he has ever met…