Mary Anning and the sea dragon

Was one of paleontolgy's most sensational discoveries originally named after a lethal triphibian cryptid that had featured in that fortean classic The Gentlemen’s Magazine?

This article first appeared in Fortean Times magazine, issue FT449

The head and neck of the "sea dragon" Ichthyosaur discovered by Mary and Joseph Anning from 2011. Part of the neck and torso of the specimen has since been lost. This species has since been renamed Temnodontosaurus platyodon It's now on display at the Natural History Museum (the British Museum, Natural History at the time.) Photo: Matt Salusbury

Among the great stories from the history of paleontology is that of how Mary Anning, then aged 12, together with her brother discovered the first identified prehistoric marine reptile. Mary's brother Joseph found the skull of what became known as Ichthyosaurus in the cliffs between their native Lyme Regis and Charmouth in 1811. From the time of Joseph's discovery of the the skull, the name "sea dragon" attached itself to the find – apparently because of its many sharp teeth and its big eye sockets.

After the Annings's discovery of the skull, Mary found the neck and partial torso of the same animal the following year. Although the Anning family had been on the poor relief, they managed to raise funds to pay labourers to dig out the fossil in November of that year. The Annings sold the skeleton of the "sea dragon" to lord of the manor Henry Hoste Henley for the princely sum of £23, enough to lift the family out of poverty. The fossil found its way to Bullock's Museum of Picadilly. It was later auctioned off to Charles Konig of the British Museum, where it caused a sensation.

The scientific establishment was forced to accept that animals had once walked the Earth or swum its seas bore scant resemblance to anything still alive in the 1820s. This allowed people to contemplate the immense span of time that had passed since the "sea dragon" lived – far longer than allowed for in a world created on October 22 4004 BC, as calculated by Archbishop Ussher of Armagh. The "sea dragon" undermined the prevailing orthodoxy which held that all animals were created as part of God's plan.

Various official names for the beast discovered by the Annings were suggested, including the grand-sounding Proteosaurus. But the official name Ichthyosaurus ("fish lizard"), Konig’s idea, finally stuck. One of the earliest life reconstructions of Ichthyosaurus was in Thomas Hawkins' Book of the Great Sea dragons – icthysauri and Plesiosauri, gadolim, taninim, of Moses. This appeared in 1840, so the "sea dragon" terminology was still in use some 30 years later.

The Encyclopedia Britannica of 1810, just before the Annings' discovery, featured an entry for "SEA-Dragon". This quotes an article in that fortean favourite The Gentlemen’s Magazine of 1749 describing an encounter "between Orford and Southwold" on the Suffolk coast with a "monster of a very singular nature." In the words of a witness who'd seen the creature’s corpse, its "head and tail… resemble those of an alligator; it has two large fins, which serve it both to swim and to fly… shaped like those which painters have given to dragons… Its body is covered with impenetrable scales; its legs have two joints, and its feet are hoofed like those of an ass: it has five rows of very white and sharp teeth in jaw and is in length about four feet."

The Britannica entry recorded how two fishermen captured the animal after a struggle in which one fisherman had two fingers bitten off, he died soon after. As the "sea dragon" was brought ashore, it escaped, flew 50 yards and lacerated another man's arm with its bite before it was battered to death with a boathook. The entry for "sea dragon" was still in the Encyclopeadia Britannica in its 1823 edition. Suffolk Ghosts and Legends quotes another Gentlemen’s Magazine article of 1750 that describes a living "Suffolk monster" exhibited in London. Possibly an attempt to cash in on the previous year's "sea dragon", this Suffolk monster looked suspiciously like a seal or sea lion.

Mary Anning is known to have been an autodidact who as an adult borrowed the latest natural history journals and laboriously copied out their articles. So could Mary have been inspired by the sea dragon Britannica entry in naming it? Lyme Regis was already a seaside resort where the well-to-do holidayed for the "sea bathing", while Encyclopedia Britannica was for some a much-used work of reference. So it's not hard to imagine a conversation involving a holidaymaker visiting Lyme Regis and remarking on the similarity between Mary Anning's new discovery and the spikey, bitey, many-toothed flying monster that mauled a fisherman off the Suffolk Coast half a century earlier, so extraordinary that they'd remembered it from Britannica.

In recent years, popular science media has revived the term “sea dragon” to describe Ichthyosaurs, the BBC's 2018 documentary Attenborough and the Sea Dragon being an example. (Yes, it’s another Ichthyosaur, whose huge skull was discovered on Britain's Jurassic coast.) Presumably, the current vogue for rebranding Ichthyosaurs as more accessible-sounding “sea dragons” is because Ichthyosaurus is near-impossible to either spell or pronounce.

SOURCES:

Encyclopedia Britannica Dictionary of Arts, Sciences, and Miscellaneous Literature Volume XIX, 1823, which quotes extensively from The Gentlemen’s Magazine, 1849. The 1823 Britannica entry for the sea-dragon is near identical to that in the 1810 edition, Suffolk Ghosts and Legends, Pamela Brooks, Halsgrove, Wellington, Somerset 2009, has a retelling of the story which quotes Britannica in its edition of 1810.

Attenborough and the Sea Dragon, BBC iPlayer, 2018, 2023,

There's more on the "sea dragon" and other Suffolk sea monsters and sea serpents in my book Mystery Animals of Suffolk.