They know it is fashionable, and that is enough for them.” They have little true understanding of what they collect or even that much interest. Then they buy from the hunters what they need to make up their list. Of collectors, she bemoans, “They find little more than a few bits of broken ammonite and belemnite and call themselves experts. I’ve met plenty of others the same–frightened of what they don’t understand.”Įlizabeth, educated and interested in paleontology, soon becomes Mary’s friend and champion, and it frustrates her to see wealthy collectors benefiting from Mary’s finds without any appreciation for their significance or the work that the fossil hunters expend to find the treasures. But Fanny couldn’t think like that and would hold on to her fear. And if lightning was to create that many bellies, it would be striking all day long.

If the Devil really shed that many toenails, he would have to have had thousands of feet. In describing her friend Fanny, Mary disparages her friend’s fear of the unknown: “I told her what Pa taught me: that ammos were snakes that had lost their heads, that bellies were thunderbolts God had thrown down, that gryphies were the Devil’s own toenails.I knew they were just stories. Although Mary is uneducated, she has the “eye” for spotting fossils, and Chevalier depicts her as having a curious and scientific mind, even if she doesn’t always understand the implications of her finds. The story focuses on the relationship between Mary Anning, a working-class girl who collects fossils along the beach in the coastal town of Lyme Regis in England, and Elizabeth Philpot, one of a trio of unmarried (read, spinster), middle-class sisters who move to Lyme from London. Mary Anning, now recognized as the finder of the first known ichthyosaur skeleton and the first two nearly complete plesiosaur skeletons, was not permitted to join the Geological Society of London, even though her fossils comprised the most exciting discoveries in geological science up to that point.

I suppose I should say “real women on the outskirts of science” because, as females, they were barred from having a meaningful place in scientific discussions in 19th century England. What I didn’t know until I was about half-way through this novel is that Tracy Chevalier’s Remarkable Creatures is based on real women in science about whom I’d never heard. I’m on a roll with splendid historical fiction featuring strong female characters.

Remarkable creatures by tracy chevalier