19th-century paleontology with Mary Anning

The illustration above (from the BBC site for kids about early women in science) is of Mary Anning, early paleontologist, fossil finder, and star of Tracy Chevalier's absolutely unputdownable book Remarkable Creatures in a dear straw bonnet with a bow.

[For more about women writing about #womeninnathis, see our summer beach read recommendations.]

[Fore more on Victorian fashion visit Outdoor Fashions of 19th Century Lady Naturalists.]

"Not every working class girl collecting weird looking stones on the beach at Lyme Regis to sell to rich Victorian tourists could expect to inspire their very own tongue-twister, but then Mary Anning was no ordinary girl."

The tongue twister inspired by Mary Anning is, of course, She sells seashells by the seashore.

Ladyfriends, it's crazy-sad that in all my years I never paused to wonder who the she of the seashell-selling could possibly be. Oh, it's just literally ground-breaking Mary Anning, the greatest fossil hunter ever known.

"In 1811, at the age of 12, she discovered the first complete ichthyosaur skeleton...emerging from the Blue Lias cliffs to the east of Lyme." (I love everything about this sentence. If I had a third child would name it Blue Lias.)

By contrast what did I discover at age 12? Blue sparkly '80s eyeliner.

"Besides the ichthyosaur, she was the first to discover the plesiosaur and even turned up the odd pterodactyl."  As one does.

Lady Harriet Silvester, who visited Anning in 1824 recorded in her diary:

"the extraordinary thing in this young woman is that she had made herself so thoroughly acquainted with the science that the moment she finds any bones she knows to what tribe they belong...by reading and application she has arrived to that greater degree of knowledge as to be in the habit of writing and talking with professors and other clever men on the subject, and they all acknowledge that she understands more of the science than anyone else."