Science Biography: Mary Anning

   Have you ever heard the tongue twister "She sells sea shells by the sea shore?"  If you have, I'm pretty sure you didn't know it is about a girl who lived in the 1800s named Mary Anning.  Those "sea shells" in the tongue twister were actually fossils that Mary Anning sold in her fossil shop.  That "sea shore" is the rocky coastline of Lyme Regis, England, the town where Mary Anning was born and where she made many important scientific fossil discoveries. 

   Mary Anning's father was a carpenter who added to his income by fossil hunting along Lyme Regis' rocky cliffs and beaches.  When Mary was a few years old, she started going fossil hunting with him.  They found lots of ammonites and plant fossils from the Jurassic period.  Sadly, when Mary was eleven years old, tragedy struck her family.  Her father was out fossil hunting when he slipped and fell off a cliff to the bottom and died.  Mary then took up her father's fossil hunting job to make money for her family.

   A few months after she took on the job, Mary made an extraordinary scientific find - the fossilized remains of a strange creature that no one else had ever seen.  She named the creature ichthyosaur, a name she invented herself.  She sold it to a museum for enough money to feed her family for half a year.  Little did she know that this was only the first of her great finds.

   She bought a store where she could display and sell her fossils.  Mary soon made two more fascinating discoveries:  a plesisaur and a pterodactyl, both of which were new to science.  Because of Mary's amazing fossil finds, many famous scientists came on fossil hunts with her.  One of these people was the man who invented the word dinosaur.  

   Mary Anning would continue her paleontological searches into her forties until she got breast cancer and died.  She was a pioneering woman scientist.  Hardly any women were scientists in the 1800s.  At a time when most women weren't encouraged to get an education, Mary taught herself and helped to establish the field of paleontology.  Sadly, most of her finds ended up in museums and personal collections without Mary getting any of the credit for them, maybe because of her gender and social status.

   If you want to know more about her, I would recommend these books that I read:  Rare Treasure:  Mary Anning and Her Remarkable Discoveries by Don Brown, Mary Anning and the Sea Dragon by Jeannine Atkins, and Chapter Five in the book The Kid Who Named Pluto and the Stories of Other Extraordinary Young People in Science by Marc McCutcheon ("The Curious Girl Who Discovered Sea-Monster Skeletons").  On Google Earth, you can visit Sidmouth Beach near Lyme Regis where Mary Anning explored the rocks.  Here you can find The Jurassic Coast World Heritage Site. Even today, you can still find lots of ammonites and plant fossils on the cliffs and beaches.  Check out this video below!