Her father was a not-very-successful cabinet-maker whom Jane Austen once asked to mend a chest, but his estimate was too high. In real life Chevalier's heroine, Mary Anning, was the greatest fossil-hunter ever. It is a stunning story, compassionately reimagined. A generation earlier, however, when Tracy Chevalier's rough-petticoated heroine was pulling out of cliffs in Lyme Regis the evidence that would go into this insight, nobody wanted to believe that God did not, as one of Chevalier's characters puts it, "plan out what He would do with all of the animals He created". Some 20 years later, he based The Origin of Species on the fact that fossils document a continuum of life forms, demonstrating that millions of species died out as others took their place. "N ew life is formed from extinction and death," wrote Darwin in 1838, in a private notebook.
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