tracy chevalier remarkable creatures a novel

And that was like setting off a little bomb in this cozy idea that the world was 6,000 years old, because suddenly people realized, actually the world isn't just as God made it.' And when Mary discovered this specimen of an animal that clearly didn't exist now - at first they called it a crocodile, but they really quickly realized it couldn't be because it has this huge bulbous eye like a doughnut, and it has paddles rather than claws and legs - they quickly figured out that it was extinct. And scientists were very slowly starting to examine that. Most people believed that the world was 6,000 years old and had been created by God in six days and set to run and if you looked around it was exactly as God had made it. 'It was prime Jane Austen territory,' Chevalier says. Making Anning's story all the more remarkable is the fact that her discoveries took place nearly 50 years before Charles Darwin wrote On the Origin of Species, during an era when scientists were still trying to figure out what a fossil was. Washington, D.C., native Tracy Chevalier's novel Girl with a Pearl Earring was published in 1999 and made into a movie of the same name in 2003. had no idea what it was - thought it was a crocodile - and went on to discover another ancient marine reptile called a plesiosaur.' 'I learned from the display that she was a working-class girl who had lived in Lyme Regis, which is on the south coast of England, and had been fossil hunting with her father, and one day she and her brother discovered a huge specimen of what turned out to be an icthyosaur, an ancient marine reptile about 200 million years old. 'I had never heard of her,' Chevalier tells Mary Louise Kelly.

At its center is a pioneering 19th century fossil hunter named Mary Anning, whom Chevalier first encountered one day while visiting a small museum about dinosaurs.

That book, her most famous, tells the story of a Dutch teenager who became a maid in the Vermeer household - and the subject, as Chevalier imagined it, of one of his most famous works, Girl with a Pearl Earring.Ĭhevalier's newest novel is called Remarkable Creatures.

She has written books set in medieval France, 18th century London and 17th century Holland - specifically, in the home of painter Johannes Vermeer. Novelist Tracy Chevalier has made a career of bringing history to life.

Tracy chevalier remarkable creatures a novel