"Remarkable Creatures" by Tracy Chevalier is a tale of the remarkable fossils uncovered by a remarkable woman, Mary Anning, whose name is all but fogotten. Tracy Chevalier's novel depicts a time when people believed that God created human beings just a few thousand years ago. But instead of setting "Remarkable Creatures" during the contemporary U.S. 'bible belt', Chevalier digs back to the English town of Lyme Regis in the early 19th century. Two hundred miles north, a toddler named Charles Darwin would someday evolve into the world's most controversial scientist, but Mary Anning's finds, and conclusions, predated Darwin's brilliant theory about evolution.
Mary Anning, is an unjustly forgotten, real-life figure in 19th-century paleontology. She was the daughter of an amateur fossil hunter and cabinetmaker who died young. Mary helped support her impoverished family by combing the shore for "curies" -- curiosities or fossils that could be sold to gentleman hobbyists. With only a few years of training from her father, she developed an extraordinary ability to spot a variety of objects from what we now call the Jurassic period. Her ichthyosaur and plesiosaur fossils are still on display in the national museums of London and Paris. Indeed, the discoveries made by this self-taught young woman proved important to the work of later leading geologists throughout the world.
Chevalier paints the novel's scientific and theological implications in subtle hues, and they provide a surprising portrait of an era on the cusp of intellectual explosion, a revolution of the mind. Geologists are wrestling with the discovery that similar layers of rock have been observed around the world. And it quickly becomes impossible to believe that the bizarre skeletons that Mary unearths -- 18-foot-long monsters with paddles instead of legs -- are really crocodiles that migrated from England hundreds of years ago. Some of the novel's most interesting sections show her gently pushing against accepted wisdom, letting the physical evidence lead her toward heretical conclusions. "To appreciate what fossils are," Chevalier has her note, "requires a leap of imagination."
The Fossils of Lyme Regis
Comments