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The Fossil Hunter: Dinosaurs, Evolution, And The Woman Whose Discoveries Changed The World (2009)

by Shelley Emling(Favorite Author)

3.62 of 5 Votes: 1

ISBN

0230611567 (ISBN13: 9780230611566)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Palgrave Macmillan Trade

review 1: An interesting read for Women's History Month. While this is a biography of Mary Anning, the first English person to discover and identify a pre-historic skeleton, it is also about the ungentlemanly but common practice of taking credit for the accomplishments of women by males. Though many of the first dinosaur fossils were discovered, carefully unearthed, and identified by Mary Anning the, at the time, exclusively male scientific community did not give her credit. Instead the purchasers of the fossils took credit. Only on extremely rare occasions was mention made of this intelligent woman. And now, few know of her. Hopefully this book will correct this slight to women in science.
review 2: "The fossil Hunter" explores the life of Mary Anning, a lower-cla... moress woman from the south of England who changed paleontology with her numerous and spectacular fossil finds. One of the main themes of the book, and Mary Anning's life, was her relationship with many of the professional paleontologists of England, who were invariably well-educated and rich. Many of these paleontologists respected Mary as a skilled and knowledgable fossil hunter and paleontologist. However, they never gave her credit for discovering the many very important fossils she found, including the first-ever discovered specimens of several groups of marine reptiles. Overall, the book is well written and researched, especially since there does not appear to be much known about Mary Anning's personal life. My one complaint about the writing is that there is a lot speculative interjection about Anning's thoughts and emotions during particular events in her life. The speculative nature of these passages was alway made clear, but I find this type of interjection in non-fiction distracting. In the end though, I enjoyed reading this book and I feel enriched in knowing more about this important yet under appreciated figure in the history of paleontology. less

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