This is Mary Anning.
She was famous for finding fossils.
She lived by the sea in the town of Lyme Regis in Dorset.
Mary was the first person to find a whole Ichthyosaurus skeleton.
You can see this at the Natural History Museum in London.
Mary found many more ancient creatures in her life, including a long-necked sea reptile called a plesiosaur and a flying reptile called a Dimorphodon.
Watch: The life of Mary Anning
Fossils are the imprinted remains of ancient creatures, forgotten about by the world, hidden in rocks under our feet.
My name is Mary Anning, and just as fossils are forgotten for many years, so too was I.
As a child I walked the seafront with my father and brother to find what we then called curiosities.
My father taught us how to patiently and carefully free these strange things from the rock.
We were very poor, so we sold what we found to people on the beach.
One customer, Elizabeth Philpot, knew so much more about my curiosities than me, so she gave me a book to help me study them.
From these books I discovered that my 'curiosities' were actually fossils; ancient creatures whose bodies were imprinted in what would become stone.
This brought to life the seafront and the cliffs that we searched with my father.
But, when my father died, we were left to search by ourselves.
One day we saw something different.
With patience and care, history began to reveal itself before my eyes.
Elizabeth brought a scientist from London who proclaimed "all science will be amazed”.
It was, and I found more amazing fossils as I grew older.
Men of science would visit, listen to my ideas, look at my finds, but most of their books never mentioned me.
What I found helped change the way humans think about the world.
But, because I am a woman, and because I am poor, I didn’t get the credit for my discoveries.
Over the years, men and women slowly became more equal, and I became celebrated as one of the greatest fossil hunters that ever lived.
What did Mary Anning do?
- Mary Anning was born in May 1799.
- Her father was a cabinet maker who sold fossils to tourists. He died when Mary was 10.
- When Mary was 12, her brother Joseph dug up the skull of a ichthyosaurus (which means ‘fish lizard’).
- The skull was more than a metre long.
- Later, Mary found the rest of the skeleton. She sold it for £23 (around £1,400 today).
- Mary would spend her time searching the beach looking for what she called ‘curiosities’. Later in her life, she realised they were actually fossils.
- When Mary was 27, she opened her own shop. It was called Anning’s Fossil Depot.
- She worked with geologists (people who study the earth).
- Mary was not allowed to join groups of scientists because she was a woman. Her name was missed out of books.
- She changed the way we think about the history of the earth.
Did you know?
- When Mary was a toddler, a woman holding her was struck by lightning! Mary survived.
- Mary had a dog called Tray, who she took with her when she searched for fossils.
- Nowadays, thousands of tourists visit Lyme Regis every year to search for fossils on the beach.
Activity – Mary Anning quiz
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