Curiosity_Joan_Thomas
2012 Longlist

Curiosity

artwork-image

ABOUT
THE BOOK

More than 40 years before the publication of The Origin of Species, 12-year-old Mary Anning, a cabinet-maker’s daughter, found the first intact skeleton of a prehistoric dolphin-like creature, and spent a year chipping it from the soft cliffs near Lyme Regis. This was only the first of many important discoveries made by this incredible woman, perhaps the most important paleontologist of her day. Henry de la Beche was the son of a gentry family, owners of a slave-worked estate in Jamaica where he spent his childhood. As an adolescent back in England, he ran away from military college, and soon found himself living with his elegant, cynical mother in Lyme Regis, where he pursued his passion for drawing and painting the landscapes and fossils of the area. One morning on an expedition to see an extraordinary discovery — a giant fossil — he meets a young woman unlike anyone he has ever met…

ABOUT
THE AUTHOR Joan
Thomas

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NOMINATING LIBRARY COMMENTS

Mary Anning, an uneducated woman, discovers and recognizes the implications of fossils in Lyme Regis, 40 years before Darwin. Fascinating reading, exposing rigid barriers of class, gender and education in the early 19th century.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

Country
Canada
Original Language
English
Author
Publisher
McClelland & Stewart Inc.

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