The Twelve-Year-Old English Girl Who Found the First Complete Ichthyosaur and Was Excluded From the Geological Society Until After Her Death
Mary Anning found her first complete ichthyosaur on the Lyme Regis cliffs in 1811 when she was twelve. She spent the next thirty-five years collecting and selling the foundational fossils of British vertebrate palaeontology. The Geological Society of London — to which she had supplied the substantial majority of its early-century specimens — admitted no women until 1904.
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