Mary Anning, the Fossil Hunter

Mary Anning was born in 1799 in Lyme Regis. It's a small town by the sea in the south of England. Her family was poor. Her father made furniture, but he also looked for fossils in the cliffs near the beach. The family sold them to tourists from a table outside their house.

Her father died in 1810, when Mary was eleven. The family had debts and very little money, so Mary and her brother Joseph went on searching. They walked along the beach after storms. The storms broke parts of the cliffs, and new fossils appeared.

In 1811, Joseph found a strange skull, more than a meter long. Some months later, Mary found the rest of the skeleton in the rock. She spent many hours with small tools, cleaning the rock away from each bone. It was an ichthyosaur. This sea reptile lived millions of years ago, long before people.

Mary didn't go to school for long, but she was clever and she never stopped learning. She read every scientific paper she could find, and she cut open fish to understand the bones in her fossils. Later she had her own fossil shop.

In 1823, she found an almost complete plesiosaur, a sea animal with a very long neck. A famous French scientist, Georges Cuvier, thought it was a fake. Was the neck too long? Did someone put bones from different animals together? Experts in London looked at it carefully and decided it was real. Cuvier accepted that he was wrong.

Many scientists bought her fossils and wrote about them, but they often didn't write her name. As a woman, she couldn't join the Geological Society of London. She couldn't even go to its meetings as a guest. She died in 1847, at the age of 47.

Today the same Geological Society has a portrait of Mary Anning. It usually hangs at the entrance, where every visitor walks past her.