Klaus Flugge Winner- Guest Blog
Congratulations to Kate Winter for winning the Klaus Flugge Prize 2024. We have a wonderful guest blog from Kate to celebrate The Fossil Hunter!
Following in the Footsteps of a Fossil Hunter by Kate Winter
As an author and illustrator, I always try to find a way to inhabit the characters in my books and feel completely immersed in the era in which they lived. A bit like an actor understanding their role, I want to see the world through someone else’s eyes and imagine how it feels to be them. I often do this when I’m drawing, sometimes by going to the real places they inhabited and sometimes by playing around in my head with the ideas and images that I’ve researched until I feel like I understand my subject and the themes that governed their life.
When learning about Mary Anning, a 19th century fossil hunter, it felt important to somehow walk in her footsteps and be in the places she had inhabited 200 years ago. I wanted to not only draw the streets and coastal town of Lyme Regis where she spent her whole life, but also to walk the shore of the Jurassic coast in Dorset where she would have found her fossils; to scan the shingle myself until a fossil caught my eye and I too was able to hold it in my hand and journey back to the past through that single object. I wanted to feel some of what Mary would have felt: the excitement of the find, the confusion about what this spiralling stone was, the curiosity to question and imagine what it could be and the story-telling power that objects can hold if you allow your mind to be taken on a journey.
The life of Mary Anning is a true gift of a tale for an author and illustrator. Her story is one of bravery, determination, excitement and genius. It encompasses themes of feminism, evolution, prehistoric marine reptiles (who doesn’t like a dinosaur?) and social change. But the main theme that leaps out and seems interwoven with her whole existence and purpose is that of imagination and creativity.
I was struck by how, at the young age of 11 years old, Mary came across the fossilised remains of a giant and never-before-seen marine reptile and was able to imagine the ancient world this creature came from. She was curious, she was creative in her thinking, and she wasn’t afraid to challenge the accepted beliefs of the time. She went on to find many fossils throughout her short and impoverished life, never abandoning her dedication to science and her quest to understand our world and its evolution.
As a creative person, Mary’s life resonated so deeply with me because she too was a storyteller at heart. She spent her days creating narratives: working out what an Ichthyosaur had had for its last lunch, or which creatures were swimming together in the sea and who was eating who, or which way the slanting cliffs fell and how many millions of years each layer represents. She also questioned her position in society as a woman from a relatively poor background. She stood up for her relevance, intelligence and contribution to science, again imagining and expressing a different, fairer way the world could be. She believed in the possibility for social change. Her work inspires us to keep questioning everything and to dare to imagine a better world.
I love how her story demonstrates how science and the creative act of storytelling can intertwine. It makes me feel quite emotional thinking about how important it is that we continue to encourage imaginative and creative play in our children. It makes me hope that creativity will one day be properly recognised as the vital driving force it is, and that we value daydreamers who help us to imagine new interpretations and possibilities for a better and fairer world.
