Minerva Scientifica Birthday: Mary Lyell
19th October 2024
Mary Lyell
Conchologist and Geologist
BORN 19th October 1808, Pancras, Middlesex, England
“TrowelBlazers – Time & Tide & Tectonics” by Frances M Lynch
TrowelBlazers was written for schools to sing with us as part of the “Raising Horizons Exhibition” at the Lyme Regis Fossil Festival 2017. It is for solo voice and female chorus and performed by the composer who dedicated it to an inspirational group of women working in earth sciences. Alongside Mary Lyell the song features a composer/geologist Alicia Ann Spottiswoode (Lady John Scott) and geologists Charlotte Murchison, Rosemary Strachan Hutton and Maria Ogilvie Gordon. You will hear the voices of geologists Prof. Kathy Whaler and Lara Kalnins, who were working at Edinburgh University in 2017, talking about their heroes.
Mary Lyell (1808 – 1873)
Mary Lyell was an important conchologist and geologist. She carried out research into snails in 1854 while in the Canary Islands. Darwin appreciated the barnacles she supplied, and in his letter of thanks to her in 1847, he demonstrated that he knew she would understand his description of geographic examples of glaciation. Among the specimens of her husband’s fossils which she catalogued were 36 boxes of fossil shells they brought back from America in 1842. She corresponded comfortably, and often on scientific topics, with other scientists and with their wives, including Gideon Mantell (1790-1852),Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895), and both Louis Agassiz (1807-1873) and his second wife Elizabeth (1822-1907) who was a naturalist.
You can find more about Mary Lyell on her Minerva Scientifica page
https://minervascientifica.co.uk/mary-lyell/
