A statue of the nineteenth century fossil hunter Mary Anning is to be erected in her home town, Lyme Regis, in Dorset on the south coast of England. The announcement comes after a campaign by schoolgirl Evie Swire, 13, and her mother, Anya Pearson, confirmed they had raised £70 000 of the £100 000 estimated to be needed for the commissioning and instillation of the statue. The campaign, Mary Anning Rocks, has attracted a range of prominent supporters, including novelist Tracy Chevalier, naturalist and broadcaster Sir David Attenborough, anthropologist and broadcaster Alice Roberts, palaeontologist and writer Dean Lomax, Earth scientist and broadcaster Anjana Khatwa, and geologist and author Hugh Torrens, and is present on both Facebook and Twitter.
The statue will be created by sculptor Denise Dutton, and will feature a life sized recreation of Anning and her Dog, Tray, at ground level, facing towards Black Ven, where Anning collected most of her fossils. It is intended that the statue will be carrying a basket into which it will be possible to deposit fossils; it has already become a custom for children to deposit fossils on Anning's grave. Denise Dutton is currently researching appropriate clothing for the statue in collaboration with the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
Marry Anning was born on 21 May 1799 and died on 9 March 1947. She explored the fossil beds of what is now referred to as the Jurassic Coast extensively, making numerous important discoveries, including the first Ichthyosaur ever discovered, the first and second Plesiosaurs discovered, and the first Pterosaur discovered outside of Germany. She is also credited with being the first palaeontologist to recognise that coprolites were fossilised faeces and that Belemnites were Cephalopod Molluscs with ink sacks. As a commercial fossil hunter from a working-class background, Anning financed her activities by selling her fossils, leading to numerous important fossil discoveries being formally described by other scientists rather than by Anning herself, although she was well respected in the scientific community of her day.
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