NewswireToday - /newswire/ - Dorchester, Dorset, United Kingdom, 08/26/2009 - Tracy Chevalier, the author of best-selling novel Girl with a Pearl Earring, has found inspiration for her new novel while visiting the Dinosaur Museum.

Visitors to Dorchester’s award winning Dinosaur Museum were thrilled to meet bestselling novelist Tracy Chevalier when she launched her new book Remarkable Creatures at the Museum on Tuesday 25th August.

Tracy, whose best-selling novel Girl with a Pearl Earring became an equally popular film spends a lot of her time in Dorset. Inspiration for her books often comes quite unexpectedly, in the case of the Girl with a Pearl Earring it was from one of Vermeer’s paintings, while her latest book, Remarkable Creatures was inspired by a trip to the Dinosaur Museum (thedinosaurmuseum.com) in Dorchester.

“There was a gallery devoted to Mary Anning, who I'd never heard of. I was immediately drawn in, says Chevalier, “I always have those sudden moments of discovery when something strikes me that I want to write about it."

Remarkable Creatures is a story based on Mary Anning, who was born in Lyme Regis in 1799 and became a major fossil collector on Dorset’s Jurassic Coast, now a World Heritage Site. She found the first complete skeleton of an ichthyosaur ever discovered. In 1821 she made another major discovery of a skeleton of a plesiosaur, the first of its kind to be found. Her third major discovery was an important fossil of a pterosaur, the first found outside Germany and thought to be the first complete skeleton found.

Mary Anning died at the age of 47, of breast cancer. A few months earlier she had been made an honorary member of the Geological Society of London despite, as a woman, being ineligible for regular membership.

Tracy’s new book promises to immortalise Mary Anning in her own inimitable way.

Agency / Source: World Heritage

Availability: All Regions (Including Int'l)

Traffic Booster: [/] Quick Newswire Today Visibility Checker

Distribution / Indexing: [+]