Her father was a not-very-successful cabinet-maker whom Jane Austen once asked to mend a chest, but his estimate was too high. In real life Chevalier's heroine, Mary Anning, was the greatest fossil-hunter ever.
It is a stunning story, compassionately reimagined. A generation earlier, however, when Tracy Chevalier's rough-petticoated heroine was pulling out of cliffs in Lyme Regis the evidence that would go into this insight, nobody wanted to believe that God did not, as one of Chevalier's characters puts it, "plan out what He would do with all of the animals He created". Some 20 years later, he based The Origin of Species on the fact that fossils document a continuum of life forms, demonstrating that millions of species died out as others took their place. It reminds us that friendship can outlast storms and landslides, anger and and jealousy."N ew life is formed from extinction and death," wrote Darwin in 1838, in a private notebook. The strong bond between Mary and Elizabeth sees them through struggles with poverty, rivalry and ostracism, as well as the physical dangers of their chosen obsession. In danger of being an outcast in her community, she takes solace in an unlikely friendship with Elizabeth Philpot, a prickly London spinster with her own passion for fossils. Working in an arena dominated by middle-class men, however, Mary finds herself out of step with her working-class background.
Remarkable Creatures is the story of Mary Anning, who has a talent for finding fossils, and whose discovery of ancient marine reptiles such as that ichthyosaur shakes the scientific community and leads to new ways of thinking about the creation of the world. With its long snout and prominent teeth, it might be a crocodile – except that it has a huge, bulbous eye. In 1810, a sister and brother uncover the fossilized skull of an unknown animal in the cliffs on the south coast of England.
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