![]() He asks if, in return for a substantial cash payment, he might leave his wife behind to lodge with Anning for a while, so that the sea air and healthy scientific thoughts will cure her “melancholia”. This is Roderick Murchison (James McArdle) who has in tow his catatonically depressed wife Charlotte (Ronan). Mary lives with her placid mother: a ripe performance from Gemma Jones.Ī smoothly condescending London scientist swans in, professing to admire Anning’s work. This subsidises her serious scientific work, scouring the shore for fossils, a beachcomber for ancient evolutionary secrets. She is a scientist forced to be a shopkeeper, running a tourist trap in Lyme Regis (“Anning’s Fossils & Curios”), selling seashell-encrusted hand mirrors and the like. Winslet gives her a look of perpetual wary resentment but fierce intellectual assertion. Winslet plays Anning as a tough, capable but careworn woman, one grown accustomed to not declaring her feelings. But I have to say that – paradoxically – the figures of this bodiced and bonneted movie, despite being based on real life, seemed a tiny bit less real than the fictional figures of his previous film, God’s Own Country. It is a film about a real-life relationship speculatively reimagined with some artistic licence. Combining these alpha players doubles or actually quadruples the screen voltage, and their passion co-exists with the cool, calm subtlety with which Lee inspects the domestic circumstances in which their paths crossed. Actually, the film that swam into my head afterwards was Jane Campion’s The Piano.Īmmonite is an absorbing drama that sensationally brings together two superlative performers: Saoirse Ronan and Kate Winslet. The complicated power balance between the principals makes the comparison incorrect. But it isn’t exactly a tale of two French Lieutenant’s Women, despite the inevitably tense walk up the fabled Cobb, filmed in thoughtful longshot. ![]() Lyme Regis is one of the best places in the UK to find ammonites and there are many wonderful examples in the museum collections.T he open secret of Victorian sexuality is rediscovered by film-maker Francis Lee in this fine, intimate, intelligently acted movie about forbidden love in 1840s Lyme Regis. Some ammonites were tiny, others were as big as a person. The ammonite lived in the front part of the shell and used the other spaces to hold gas and air which it used to float up and down in the sea and propel itself. Their shell is a spiral shape made up of chambers, the sections grow over time as the Ammonite gets bigger. There soft body and tentacles are rarely preserved, but there iconic shell are often preserved in the rock and found on the beaches around Lyme Regis. AmmonitesĪmmonites are related to squids, octopuses and nautilus still living in seas around the world today. ![]() It’s large eye socket suggests it had good eyesight and it was an apex predator, feeding on fish, plesiosaurs and other ichthyosaurs. It’s long slender body is described as fish-like and its’ powerful tail, almost the same length as the body, made it a fast cruising swimmer. ![]() It lived in the Early Jurassic period, ranging between 200 and 175 million years ago in the sea that covered Lyme Regis and as far afield as the coast of Chile. It is the same type of Ichthyosaur, as the one discovered by Mary Anning and her brother, 200 hundred years earlier in 1811.Ĭalled Temnodontosaurus, meaning in Greek “cutting-tooth lizard”, (temno, meaning “to cut”, odont meaning “tooth” and sauros meaning “lizard”), it is on display with part of the spine, rib cage and front fins. This very large Ichthyosaur was discovered within metres of Lyme Regis Museum by local collector and fossil hunter Mike Harrison in 2011. Museum at Home > Fossils/Ammonite The Lyme Bay Ichthyosaur (Temnodontosaurus platydon)
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