Colonel Thomas James Birch became Thomas James Bosvile in 1824, when he inherited the title and the family estate in Yorkshire He died in 1829 William Buckland did find a woman to marry him, in 1825—she was sitting opposite him in a coach and reading a volume of Cuvier He continued to eat his way through the animal kingdom, and to try to reconcile geology with his religious beliefs He later became Dean of Westminster School, but towards the end of his life he suffered from mental illness and had to be placed in an asylum Between 1830 and 1833 Charles Lyell published Principles of Geology, which became the seminal text on modern geology; Charles Darwin took it with him on his famous voyage on the Beagle Jane Austen visited Lyme in September 1804, and there is no reason why she and Margaret Philpot could not have been in the Assembly Rooms at the same time Indeed, she did meet Richard Anning, for she went to his shop to have him give her a quote on fixing the broken lid of a chest According to a letter she wrote to her sister, he charged far too much, and she took her business elsewhere Remarkable Creatures is a work of fiction, but many of the people existed, and events such as Colonel Birch’s auction and the Geological Society meeting where Conybeare talked about the plesiosaur did take place And Mary did indeed write at the bottom of a scientific paper she had copied out: “When I write a paper there shall not be but one preface.” Sadly she never did write her own scientific paper Twenty-first-century attitudes towards time and our expectations of story are very different from the shape of Mary Anning’s life She spent day after day, year after year, doing the same thing on the beach I have taken the events of her life and condensed them to fit into a narrative that is not stretched beyond the reader’s patience Hence events, while in order, do not always coincide exactly with actual dates and time spans Plus, of course, I made up plenty For instance, while there was gossip about Mary and Buckland and Mary and Birch, there was no proof That is where only a novelist can step in I would like to thank the following: the staff of the libraries at the Geological Society and the Natural History Museum, London; the staff of the Lyme Regis Philpot Museum, the Dorset County Museum and the Dorset History Centre in Dorchester; the Dinosaur Museum, Dorchester, where I first learned of Mary Anning; Philippe Taquet of the Musée National d’Histoire Naturelle, Paris; Paul Jeffery at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History; Maureen Stollery for her help with Philpot genealogy; Alexandria Lawrence; Jonny Geller; Deborah Schneider; Susan Watt; Carole DeSanti; and Jonathan Drori