ONCE again, Tracy Chevalier has turned real people into fiction. Mary Anning was the first and greatest fossil hunter. As an illiterate young girl on the Dorset coast she found the fossilised remains of the ichthyosaurus – which she called a crocodile – plesiosaurus, pterodactyl and others. She started by selling small finds to tourists, but soon many great scientists made their careers from Mary’s findings, dug out of the fierce mud, sand and rock.

The descriptions of fossil gathering are so vivid, you can practically feel the mud under your nails.

Mary’s father was a cabinet maker, once consulted by Jane Austen, who found him too expensive.

And the other character in this novel could be straight out of Jane Austen. Elizabeth Philpot is a middle- class, middle-aged spinster, forced to live in Lyme Regis on £150 a year when her brother marries. Yet she, too, is fascinated by fossils and she and Mary strike up an unlikely friendship, despite the huge gulf of class and education that divides them.

As the discovery of the fossils challenges the Victorian beliefs in how the world was made and God’s plan for the universe we are caught up in the excitement – as well as the problems – of scientific research.

But what is particularly fascinating is the relationship between the two women. It is they, too, who are the remarkable creatures.

Sharon Griffiths