Mary Anning Found the First Plesiosaur, and the Geological Society Wouldn't Let Her In
She survived a lightning strike at 15 months, dug up an ichthyosaur at 12, and supplied half of British paleontology — without membership.
Mary Anning was twelve, working her dead father's fossil pitch on the cliffs of Lyme Regis in Dorset, when she finished the excavation of a 17-foot ichthyosaur skeleton — the first specimen ever scientifically described. That was around 1811. By her early twenties she had pulled the first nearly complete plesiosaur out of the same crumbling Jurassic shale, with 35 vertebrae arranged in a neck so long the French anatomist Georges Cuvier initially refused to believe the find was real. In 1828 she added the first pterosaur skeleton found outside Germany, which caused a brief sensation when it was put on display at the British Museum.
Anning ran a shop, Anning's Fossil Depot, with a glass storefront on Broad Street; King Frederick Augustus II of Saxony bought a specimen from her in 1844. She identified what people had been calling "bezoar stones" as fossilized feces — coprolites — and noticed that belemnite fossils preserved ink sacs identical to those of modern cuttlefish.
All of this happened while the Geological Society of London refused to admit her, or any woman, as a member or even as a meeting attendee. Male geologists routinely published her finds without crediting her. She lived in genuine financial precarity until 1838, when a civil list pension of £25 a year was secured for her, partly through the lobbying of William Buckland. She died of breast cancer in 1847. The Geological Society finally admitted women in 1904.
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