At 12 years old, Mary Anning stood on a crumbling cliff in Lyme Regis and dug out the skeleton of a creature no one in England had a name for. Her brother had found the skull. She found everything else.
Born in 1799 into a poor family, she lost her father young, and the debts he left behind pushed the family to the edge. She searched the beaches for fossils and sold them to survive, working in dangerous landslide-prone cliffs. Over the years she uncovered the first complete plesiosaur skeleton, one of the first pterosaur skeletons found in Britain, and she worked out that mysterious stones inside fossil skeletons were fossilized dung, revealing what ancient animals ate.
Leading scientists traveled to her tiny shop to buy fossils and ask her questions. Yet as a working-class woman she couldn't join the Geological Society, and her discoveries were published under men's names. She died in 1847 at 47, and only after her death did the scientific world begin to give her credit.
I'm working on growing this project: researching, writing, narrating, and sharing the real stories of women history forgot or never told enough about — available in the Lilithia app in both Turkish and English.
If you enjoyed this and want to see the project continue, buying me a coffee makes a huge difference 🖤
📱 App: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.busrwa.lilithia
🎬 YouTube:
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