Mary Anning was a British fossil collector, dealer, and paleontologist who became known around the world for a number of important finds she made in the Jurassic marine fossil beds at Lyme Regis in Dorset, where she lived. Her work contributed to fundamental changes that occurred during her lifetime in scientific thinking about prehistoric life and the history of the Earth.
At the time Mary Anning lived, scientists were just beginning to appreciate the significance of fossils--recognizing them as the remains of long-extinct creatures, rather than the rare skeletons of still-living animals. Not a trained scientist herself, Anning got into fossil collecting as a way of making money: when she was 12 years old, she found an ichthyosaur skeleton on the English coast, and she discovered the first-ever plesiosaur fossil ten years later. By this time she had come to the attention of the British scientific establishment, which must not have been surprised when she managed to dig up a Dimorphodon (a genus of pterosaur that, until then, had never been identified outside Germany).
Mary Anning's upbringing had a lot to do with her later notoriety. Even when she was a child, the English town of Lyme Regis was known for its unusual fossils, mostly of marine animals like ammonites and belemnites dating to the early Jurassic period. During the Napoleonic Wars, before Mary had reached her teens, her father took her and her brother out to collect fossils and sell them to curious visitors, since the upheavals across the English Channel had a dismal effect on the local economy (in fact, Anning's father was himself involved in organizing protests against food shortages).
By the time she died, at the age of 47, Mary Anning had received a lifetime annuity from the British Association for the Advancement of Science--not a small honor at a time when women weren't expected to be literate, much less capable of making scientific discoveries. Anning was memorialized even more effectively by a popular tongue-twister written by Terry Sullivan in the late nineteenth century: "She sells sea shells by the sea shore."
