Ibn al-Haytham and the Darkened Room
In eleventh-century Cairo, a scholar under house arrest proved that light travels into the eye, not out of it. Dalia tells the story and explains why his method mattered as much as his answer.
Mary Anning and the Monster in the Cliff
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Show notes
The fossil seller of Lyme Regis
Mary Anning had no formal education and could not join the Geological Society, yet the animals she pulled out of the Dorset cliffs forced naturalists to accept that whole species could vanish. Dalia follows her from the ichthyosaur of 1811 to the plesiosaur that Cuvier first called a fake, and asks what the record says about credit and who gets it.
- The landslide economy of Lyme Regis
- The 1811 ichthyosaur and who paid for it
- Cuvier, the plesiosaur and the accusation of fraud
- Extinction as a scandalous idea
- A palaeontologist on how Anning is cited today
Next time, the scholars of Baghdad walk across a desert to measure the Earth.
Transcript
This is Before the Microscope, I am Dalia Fouad. Today we go to a cold beach in the south of England in 1811, where a twelve-year-old girl and her brother are digging a skull out of a cliff that collapses every winter. Mary Anning sold fossils to survive. The men who bought them wrote the papers, named the species and joined the societies she was not allowed to enter. But the animals she found, the ichthyosaur, the plesiosaur that the great Cuvier declared a forgery until he saw it, changed what naturalists were willing to believe about extinction. I will tell you what the letters and ledgers actually say, and a palaeontologist will explain how her name is used now. You are listening on Witspeak Podcasts. Mind the tide.
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