Mary Anning and Steve Etches: fossil finders and legacy makers of England’s Jurassic Coast
7 MINUTE READ
Two passionate, self-taught fossil collectors from the English coastline, separated by time but united by curiosity. Mary Anning and Steve Etches have each helped unlock the story of life on Earth. We spoke to Steve Etches about their lives, work and how the Jurassic Coast continues to deliver.
When Steve Etches first picked up a fossil as a child, he had no idea it would one day lead to his own museum. A qualified plumber with no formal scientific background, Steve has spent more than 40 years collecting and studying Jurassic marine fossils. You can see the grand sum of his efforts in The Etches Collection museum in Kimmeridge, Dorset on England’s south coast.
Though humble about comparisons to Mary Anning, who died just over 100 years before Steve was born, Steve shares much in common with the pioneering 19th-century fossil hunter from Lyme Regis.
We interviewed Steve to explore those parallels, what the Jurassic Coast means to him and why you need to visit – ideally on one of our two-day fossil-hunting tours!
Mary Anning: the original fossil hunter
Born to a poor family in Lyme Regis in 1799, Mary Anning scoured the cliffs of west Dorset for fossils at a time when women were not admitted to scientific societies. Inspired by her father, a cabinetmaker and amateur fossil collector, she taught herself about geology and anatomy – despite most of her female contemporaries not receiving a formal education – and made some extraordinary discoveries.
Her finds include the first correctly identified ichthyosaur skeleton (48 years before Darwin published On the Origin of Species), plesiosaurs and the first pterosaur discovered outside Germany. Less glamorously, her study of coprolites (fossilised faeces) helped scientists understand prehistoric ecosystems.
Anning sold fossils to support her family after her father’s death, and though she was respected by some contemporary academics, she received little recognition in her lifetime. Her finds were often not credited in the scientific papers penned by the male scientists who bought the specimens from her. When she died of breast cancer in 1847, aged 47, she was still struggling to make ends meet despite her extraordinary discoveries that helped to fuel public interest in fossil collecting and displays at major museums. Today, she is rightly recognised as one of the founding figures of palaeontology.
Steve Etches: modern fossil collecting pioneer
After that first find and a childhood spent mostly outside, it wasn’t until a visit to a fossil shop in Wimborne in his thirties that Steve’s interest was rekindled. Soon he was taking his children out fossil hunting. The family’s interest waned, but for Steve, it became a lifelong obsession.
“If you live on the Jurassic Coast, you’ve got a whole suite of Jurassic rocks to collect fossils from,” he explained. He was drawn particularly to the Kimmeridge Clay, a formation dismissed in one respected guidebook as ‘the least interesting to the British fossil collector.’ That sneery slight served to motivate him further.
“Provenance is critical if you collect. On that basis, rather than just collect a series of Jurassic rocks, which would be dead easy in Dorset, I decided I would collect solely Kimmeridge material,” Steve said.
Forty years later, his collection includes over 2,000 specimens, including soft-bodied creatures and species new to science.
Legacies of the underdogs
Mary and Steve share not only their coastal Dorset roots, but also their outsider status in the world of science. Neither had formal training. Both made major discoveries. Both were driven by instinct, field experience and a deep personal fascination with the past.
“The word ‘amateur’ rankles with me,” Steve said. “It can have so many different connotations and sometimes there’s a stigma attached to someone like myself.”
Like Mary Anning, he has faced scepticism from academic circles. “When I went to a major museum, I remember a professor saying, ‘What’s a guy like you coming up to see all this material?'” But over time, attitudes have mostly shifted.
While Mary Anning’s ichthyosaur, plesiosaur and pterosaur are now on display and fully credited to her in London’s Natural History Museum – albeit posthumously – Steve didn’t have to wait so long to received formal recognition. He now holds an MBE and an honorary doctorate (though he rarely uses the titles) and has donated his collection to the nation. “But it’s not the person that matters,” he added. “It’s the collection.”
The Etches Collection, opened in 2016, is testament to that belief. The independent museum was designed to the highest curatorial standards and houses a globally significant range of marine fossils, all found locally.
“My 40 years of fossil collecting have yielded about 18 new species and there’s lots more still to be described. I’m not blowing my own trumpet but, when you come from my background, to be able to leave behind something like this gives you a great sense of achievement,” he said.
“Money doesn’t give you that same sense of achievement but having the museum is a dream come true. The Etches Collection is not just a museum. It’s not static. It’s small but our curatorial standards set the benchmark for regional museums. And education is at the heart of what we do; last year we had 140 school groups visit.”
A changing image for the self-taught collector
While Steve’s story mirrors Mary Anning’s in its independence and perseverance, it also shows how things have changed.
As a woman in 19th-century Britain, Anning was excluded from societies and barely acknowledged in publications. Steve, despite some early scepticism from professional circles, has built his own institution, collaborated with researchers and attracted global media attention.
About that media attention… If you’ve heard of Steve Etches before reading this, it’s probably in connection with David Attenborough. A major highlight of Steve’s work on the Jurassic Coast was the rescue of a nearly two-metre pliosaur skull, now the subject of a David Attenborough BBC documentary, Attenborough & The Giant Sea Monster.
Extracting the skull involved ropes, air tools, climbing teams and community support. “No university or museum would have attempted it,” Steve told us. “It was too dangerous. But I know the rocks intimately. I knew what we needed to do.”
He’s hopeful the rest of the skeleton, still lodged in the cliff, can be excavated, not just for the science, but to secure the future of the museum. A planned extension would house the pliosaur in a dedicated predator gallery. To make this happen, he needs £500,000, and he’s pouring his heart, soul and every penny he can get into raising it.
Donate to help Steve rescue the remaining body of the pliosaur
The Jurassic Coast: a living laboratory
Stretching 95 miles along the English Channel, the Jurassic Coast was classified a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2001. It tells a near-continuous story of 185 million years of Earth’s history, and more than 300 years of contributions to earth science thanks to pioneering palaeontologists just like Mary Anning and Steve Etches.
For Steve, this part of the world is unrivalled. “You can travel through time here,” he said. “And it’s the most varied landscape and varied geology you can see. A fantastic place.”
He’s passionate about keeping the coast open to responsible fossil hunters. Afterall, in his view, it’s amateurs who have made most of the big discoveries.
“Every major find in collections was found by an amateur. What really annoys me is that the people who go out and find it and prepare it never get the recognition that they deserve.”
And he’s critical of overly restrictive collecting laws in some other countries. “In Canada,” he tells us, “You and I can’t go collecting any vertebrate remains. You’re not allowed to pick up even bones. What they’re saying is, ‘Just let the experts go in the field and do this’. So thousands of reptiles and dinosaur fossils will never see the light of day due to those constraints. If a fossil gets exposed to the elements, it will self-destruct. What a waste. In England, at the moment, there aren’t those constraints.”
So what constraints are there in England? In Dorset, you should follow the West Dorset Fossil Collecting Code. Essentially, it means you can take home any loose fossils you find on the beach, but you can’t extract any from the cliffs, shale ledges or rockbed. And naturally, you should report any scientifically important discoveries you might be lucky enough to stumble across to a local museum.
Join us for a guided fossil hunt on England’s Jurassic Coast
Inspiration across the ages
Mary Anning once ground up fossilised squid ink to write letters to customers. Steve extracts fossil eggs, ink sacs, and even ancient stomach contents using air tools and microscopes. The technology may be different, but the motivation is the same: to uncover lost worlds and share them with others.
Would Mary Anning have enjoyed The Etches Collection? Steve believes so. “I would love to talk to her. We’d have got on really well,” he said. “Poor devil, she had a small shop and her preservation tools were nothing compared to what we’ve got today. She’d have loved what’s possible now with preparation and preservation. She had to sell her stuff to put food on the table; I’ve been lucky to preserve mine.”
Together, Mary Anning’s and Steve Etches’ stories remind us how much science owes to the dedicated outsider. And how powerful it is when passion, place, and purpose align.
Walk in the footsteps of Mary Anning and Steve Etches with GeoCultura
Join GeoCultura on a guided journey along England’s Jurassic Coast, from Lyme Regis to Kimmeridge and see the coastline that shaped Mary Anning, Steve Etches and modern palaeontology.
Explore our 2-day Jurassic Coast fossil hunting and Etches Collection tours
Discover all our Southern England tours