<P> One of the family's keenest customers was Lieutenant - Colonel Thomas James Birch, later Bosvile, a wealthy collector from Lincolnshire, who bought several specimens from them . In 1820 Birch became disturbed by the family's poverty . Having made no major discoveries for a year, they were at the point of having to sell their furniture to pay the rent . So he decided to auction the fossils he had purchased from them on their behalf . He wrote to the palaeontologist Gideon Mantell on 5 March that year to say that the sale was "for the benefit of the poor woman and her son and daughter at Lyme, who have in truth found almost all the fine things which have been submitted to scientific investigation...I may never again possess what I am about to part with, yet in doing it I shall have the satisfaction of knowing that the money will be well applied ." The auction was held at Bullocks in London on 15 May 1820, and raised £ 400 (worth the equivalent of over £ 26,000 in 2010). How much of that was given to the Annings is not known, but it seems to have placed the family on a steadier financial footing, and with buyers arriving from Paris and Vienna, the three - day event raised the family's profile within the geological community . </P> <P> Anning continued to support herself selling fossils . Her primary stock in trade consisted of invertebrate fossils such as ammonite and belemnite shells, which were common in the area and sold for a few shillings . Vertebrate fossils, such as ichthyosaur skeletons, sold for more, but were much rarer . Collecting them was dangerous winter work . In 1823, an article in The Bristol Mirror said of her: </P> <P> This persevering female has for years gone daily in search of fossil remains of importance at every tide, for many miles under the hanging cliffs at Lyme, whose fallen masses are her immediate object, as they alone contain these valuable relics of a former world, which must be snatched at the moment of their fall, at the continual risk of being crushed by the half suspended fragments they leave behind, or be left to be destroyed by the returning tide:--to her exertions we owe nearly all the fine specimens of Ichthyosauri of the great collections...</P> <P> The risks of her profession were illustrated when on October 1833 she barely avoided being killed by a landslide that buried her black - and - white terrier, Tray, her constant companion when she went collecting . She wrote to a friend, Charlotte Murchison, in November of that year: "Perhaps you will laugh when I say that the death of my old faithful dog has quite upset me, the cliff that fell upon him and killed him in a moment before my eyes, and close to my feet...it was but a moment between me and the same fate ." </P>

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