The Giant Sea Monster

I don’t know if  you’ve had the time to see the David Attenborough documentary The Giant Sea Monster.  Well, yesterday I visited the museum not far away from where I live where this enormous creature actually resides and was able to get up snout to snout with him/her.  It’s a brilliantly well presented modern museum here on the Jurassic Coast.  Whilst there I saw how much sheer effort is employed getting these fossils out of the cliffs and then the months and years of work chipping them delicately out of the rock.  Here and there are references to the sheer slog and grit of a previous palaeontologist Mary Anning.

A few years ago I was commissioned to write a play by AsOne Theatre Company about the life of Mary Anning. In”Mary Anning – Lost in Time” I tried to portray the truth of someone who must have suffered extreme hardship of back breaking toil in the mud while all the time trying to feed her family and establish her work as a scientist.  I hope my play was a lot closer to the truth than the rather fanciful depictions of her in other novels and films and will serve as some tribute to her sheer graft.

You can read the script (or perform the play) if you click on the link below of my play publisher LazyBee Scripts.

 My play here:

https://www.lazybeescripts.co.uk/Scripts/ScriptDetails.aspx?iSc=3580

Meanwhile don’t forget to see David Attenborough’s rather terrifying Pliosaur monster in the flesh, (well, stone) at the Steve Etches Collection Museum,  Kimmeridge.  Well worth a trip.  Scary Monsters and Nice people. With examples of the sort of ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs that Mary Anning devoted her life to.

The Museum Here

https://www.theetchescollection.org/