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The memory of that poem and Tracy Chevalier\u2019s historical fiction book, Remarkable Creatures<\/em>,<\/em> had now led me to spend a week in Weymouth, a slightly faded seaside resort on the Jurassic Coast in west Dorset. From there, I then took the X53 bus from King George\u2019s Statue station and traveled 95 miles northwest along Chesil Beach to Lyme Regis. Among other sites, Lyme Regis is where you find The Cobb, a walkable, serpentine breakwater harbor wall poking out into Lyme Bay, one bay west from Weymouth Bay on the English Channel. The Cobb was made famous in Jane Austen\u2019s book Persuasion<\/em>, where Captain Wentworth and Anne Elliott go walking. The Cobb wall is also where Meryl Streep\u2019s French Lieutenant\u2019s woman character does some fashionably mysterious turns in her heavy, chocolate-colored cloak. But to me it is perhaps most<\/em> famous as the setting for Mary Anning\u2019s ichthyosaur finds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I had waited for a sunny day to make my visit, even though I knew that Mary had never been a fair-weather paleontologist. She had in fact made many of her most important finds after winter storms. In 2001, UNESCO listed the \u201cJurassic Coast\u201d along Dorset and East Devon beaches, cliffs, and headland, one of the most significant Earth Science sites in the world. It is the United Kingdom\u2019s only natural World Heritage site, and the only place in the world where 185 million years of geology in a near-continuous sequence are revealed in the limestone-and-mudstone cliffs. A walk along the coast is like walking through the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cetaceous periods.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Captain Wentworth and Anne care for Louisa, who had just\u00a0impulsively jumped from the Cobb, calling out \u201cCatch me!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Mary Anning (May 21, 1799\u2013March 9, 1847, from breast cancer) was a British fossil collector, dealer, and paleontologist, who became known around the world for important finds in the Jurassic marine fossil beds at Lyme Regis. She contributed to fundamental changes in scientific thinking about prehistoric life and the history of the Earth. Her birth home is now a museum.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the area\u2019s layered Blue Lias cliffs, Mary Anning searched for fossils and skeletons. When landslides exposed new fossils, they had to be collected quickly before they were washed out to sea. As it still is today, this was dangerous work, and she nearly lost her life in 1833 during a landslide that killed her loyal dog, Tray. Walking the cliffs today, you are still confronted with detours, cautionary signs, and roped-off areas, protecting the intrepid from landslips and cave-ins.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Mary\u2019s discoveries included the first ichthyosaur skeleton correctly identified, which she and her brother Joseph had found when she was twelve years old. (He found the skull; she found the torso.) Named ichthyosaur (\u201cfish lizard\u201d in Greek), it is neither a fish nor a lizard, but a marine reptile. They also found the first two plesiosaurs and the first pterosaur skeleton located outside Bavaria, Germany, plus important fish fossils. She helped confirm that coprolites (a trace fossil and originally confused with gastrointestinal \u201cbezoar stones\u201d) were in fact fossilized feces, since they were so often found in fossils\u2019 lower intestines and excretory tracts. Bezoar stones are found only in the stomach. She also discovered that fossils of belemnites (extinct squid-like creatures) contained ink sacs like those of modern cephalopods.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It was a thrill to walk in Mary\u2019s house, view down the coastline where she had searched for paleontological treasures and see the workmen repairing the coastline from the 2013-2014 winter storms: a dangerous place during Mary\u2019s time and still dangerous today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I was a small girl in California when I\u2019d first heard of the ichthyosaurs. My mother had read me Isabel Frances Bellous\u2019s poem \u201cThe Ichthyosaurus.\u201d There once was an ichthyosaurus,Who lived when the earth was all porous,Be he fainted with shameWhen he first heard his name,And departed a long time before us. My mother might have […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1293","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-travel-writing","category-united-kingdom-and-ireland-travel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kathygrossman.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1293","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kathygrossman.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kathygrossman.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathygrossman.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathygrossman.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1293"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathygrossman.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1293\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1295,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathygrossman.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1293\/revisions\/1295"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kathygrossman.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1293"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathygrossman.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1293"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathygrossman.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1293"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}