Tom Sharpe

Portrait of Mary Anning wearing a green cloak and a straw bonnet tied with a red ribbon. She holds a hammer and carries a basket over her arm.

Gravestone for Joseph Anning, several of his children and his sister, Mary Anning. Some flowers and a toy dinosaur have been left on the grave.

Mary Anning 21 May 1799–9 March 1847.

Her Purbeck Stone gravestone at St Michael's Church, Lyme Regis was erected by her brother's widow, Amelia, after Joseph's death in 1849 and also commemorates several of their children who died in the 1830s. The stone has been recut and cleaned several times.

Today is International Women's Day and we're celebrating Mary Buckland! Buckland was a naturalist and illustrator who's work is being celebrated in our current special exhibition, Breaking Ground.

This photo is one of our most recent acquisitions and was donated by a descendant of the Bucklands.

Interesting palaeopiscatorial thread here.

Portrait of Mary Anning in February 1842. She wears a long green cloak and a straw bonnet tied with a red ribbon. She holds a hammer and carries a basket. AT her feet are some fossils and her dog.

Palaeontologist #MaryAnning was a legend in her lifetime. From 1821 to 1846 she's mentioned in at least 250 newspapers, magazines, popular books and scientific papers & books. Hundreds of geologists and tourists went to Lyme Regis to meet 'the celebrated Mary Anning'.
#InternationalWomensDay

Sand beach, blue sea, blue sky, some people on the beach.

It’s 7oC but the sun is shining: beach weather in Scotland.

Red postbox in an old stone wall with ivy at its base.

#PostboxSaturday: a Victorian wall box, Baybridge, Northumberland.

Stark painting of a still life containing fossils and books, including Charles Lyell's Elements of Geology.

"Fossils (February)" by the English surrealist Tristram Hillier. This 1955 painting was commissioned by Shell for the Shell Book of Nature, Fossils, Insects and Reptiles. From Ark UK: Government Art Collection. You Can Be Sure Of Shell... #FossilFriday

A large block of rock, roughly circular in cross section.

#FossilFriday: a lump of lycopod. Part of the trunk of a large Carboniferous tree in sandstone, situated outside The Sill, the Northumberland National Park visitor centre.

#FossilFriday Verbeekiella australis, among the last of the Palaeozoic ‘horn corals’ belonging to the class Rugosa, from the Permian of Timor. The function of the unusual axial structure is unclear according to my colleague Brian Rosen.

Left, photograph of a man in a dark coat and light waistcoat, standing next to a bookcase; right, a fossil fish in a dark stone frame.

5 March 1807, Shropshire: birth of Beriah Botfield, antiquarian, bibliographer, collector, MP. He attended the geology lectures of William Buckland at Oxford and in 1829 purchased a Dapedium & a small ichthyosaur from #MaryAnning & gave them to Buckland. They're still @morethanadodo.bsky.social

A pile of books related;ating to geology and history.

As it's #WorldBookDay, here's the pile on my desk for today.

Orange and gold sky over misty low hills.

A golden dawn this morning in East Lothian.

Left, Lead mine engine house, a ruined building with a chimney; top right moorland below a grey sky; bottom right, fenced off mine shaft with warning sign.

Some photos from weekend wanders in the North Pennine Orefield: Shildon Engine House of 1808; the heather moorland of Bulbeck Common; one of many fenced-off and capped old mine shafts.

Left. extract from Strickland's 1845 paper 'On certain Calcareo-corneous Bodies found in the outer chambers of Ammonites' which begins by acknowledging Mary Anning; right portrait of Strickland as a young man, seated and holding an open book.

2 March 1811, Reighton, Yorkshire: birth of geologist and naturalist Hugh Strickland. In 1841 #MaryAnning drew his attention to a feature of ammonite shells which she thought were ink sacs but were in fact aptychi, plates used for closing off the aperture of the shell. #MolluscMonday

Top left, book title page 'Letters and Sounds: an Introduction to English Reading on an Entirely New Plan'; right, photograph of Alexander Melville Bell in full Victorian hirsuteness; bottom left, an extract form his book of elocution exercises, including 'She sells sea shells'

1 March 1819, Edinburgh: birth of Alexander Melville Bell. An elocution & phonetics lecturer at Edinburgh University, his 1855 book 'Letters and Sounds' included as an elocution exercise some tongue-twisting short sentences, amongst them ‘She sells sea-shells’. There is no connection to #MaryAnning.

Thanks so much to the packed crowd who came out to see the premiere of the latest iteration of "A Curious Thing- The Story of Mary Anning." You rocked, and we would not be able to do what we do without you! ❤️

See you on the weekend! BOOK NOW at... linktr.ee/TheseCurious...

#PostboxSaturday post office Blanchland, Northumberland

A bleak landscape with grey clouds, a large rock on left labelled ‘England’ with a flagpole with St George’s Cross blowing in the wind.

Entering a strange and foreign land. What untold wonders and mysteries lie beyond?

Close up of a handwritten label on a fossil specimen: 'This Fossil is the first I ever obtained. It was purchased from Mary Anning in July 1824. It then wanted the point of the nose. This was found 3 years after rolled on the sands & she sent it to me to Oxford – Enniskillen'

#FossilFriday: A curator's dream label. Doesn't get much better than this: 'This Fossil is the first I ever obtained. It was purchased from Mary Anning in July 1824. It then wanted the point of the nose. This was found 3 years after rolled on the sands & she sent it to me to Oxford – Enniskillen'

Title page pf a book, 'A Natural History of the Crinoidea, or Lily-Shape Animals' by J.S. Miller, 1821.

A plate from Miller's 1821 book showing part of the stem and arms of the Jurassic crinoid Pentacrinites briareus.

26 February 1779, Danzig, Prussia: birth of palaeontologist & curator Johann Samuel Müller. In 1801 he settled in Bristol after missing his ship to the US, adopted the name Miller, collected fossil crinoids & in 1821 defined the Class Crinoidea. He gave a copy of his book to #MaryAnning in 1824.

I’m sure they’ll unwrap it for you if you ask nicely! It’s well worth a look.

I’m being uncharacteristically diplomatic. I sympathise with the problem St Michaels clearly had. And maybe there was little option.

Just in the last couple of years, I think. I first saw the kitchen units there in 2024. It's still the parish church, but I guess they need fewer pews these days and there's more demand for refreshment facilities, sadly. I understand that such facilities are needed, but in front of such a window?

But when I was last there I was saddened and disappointed to see how the church interior has been altered with seemingly little regard for the significance of this particular window which is sought out by countless visitors who come to Lyme on the trail of Mary Anning.

Interior view of a stained glass window in a church, with pews in the foreground and monuments on the wall.

In February 1850 a William Wailes stained glass window of the Six Acts of Mercy from St Matthew's Gospel was installed in St Michael's Church, Lyme Regis in memory of #MaryAnning by the vicar and her friends at the Geological Society. It recognises both her contribution to geology and her charity.

Purple and orange skies at dawn over a rounded hill.

Eye-catching dawn over the rounded laccolithic lump of Traprain Law in East Lothian this morning.

You're very welcome. I loved the poem, its premise and all its references. Both Lyme and Hunstanton are places I know well. It's great to see Mary Anning featuring. She seems to have been fond of poetry herself.

All good wishes to @heapsgood.bsky.social and the cast of 'A Curious Thing' for their opening on Wednesday night at the Adelaide Fringe where the lucky folks in the audience will meet not one, not two, but three Mary Annings! Great to hear tickets are going fast.

Lovely geologically-themed poem here, traversing the Chalk from Lyme to Hunstanton, with more than a nod to #MaryAnning.

Annotated sketch by George Cumberland of a skeleton of Plesiosaurus showing its long neck, small head and four paddle-like limbs, and emphasising a scatter of vertebrae at the base of the neck.

About 24 February 1824 Bristol fossil collector George Cumberland sent his drawing (copied from one by #MaryAnning) of Plesiosaurus to Charles Konig at the British Museum asking if he thought the bones all belonged to one animal. Konig had seen the fossil and replied that it was 'perfectly genuine'.