Hugh Torrens

Great Lives

Great Lives: Tracy Chevalier on Mary Anning

BBC Radio 4

Tracy Chevalier on Mary Anning

BBC Radio 4 - Great Lives, Tracy Chevalier on Mary Anning

Novelist Tracy Chevalier chooses the fossil hunter Mary Anning as her great life.

4 Extra Debut. Novelist Tracy Chevalier chooses the Dorset Jurassic Coast fossil hunter, Mary Anning. With Matthew Parris. From 2017.

Novelist Tracy Chevalier discusses the life of Mary Anning with Matthew Parris.

Mary was a working class woman from Lyme Regis who discovered full dinosaur skeletons on Dorset's Jurassic Coast and sold them to collectors in the early 1800s. 

Her remarkable finds came before Charles Darwin's theory of evolution and she believed them at first to be giant crocodiles, but as scientists began flocking to Lyme Regis to buy her specimens, she started to educate herself in geology, becoming an authority on fossils.

However, as with many of the subjects of Great Lives, she was never fully credited for her efforts and faded from public consciousness after her death.

With Hugh Torrens, Emeritus Professor of History of Science and Technology at the University of Keele. 

Producer: Maggie Ayre

First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in August 2017.

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