Women Who Dared by Linda Skeers

Author:Linda Skeers
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Published: 2017-07-25T04:00:00+00:00

1799–1847 • England

Mary spent her whole life in the seaside town of Lyme Regis in Dorset, England. As a child she loved to hunt for interesting rocks, seashells, and fossils with her father and brother. They then sold their discoveries to tourists as vacation souvenirs.

When Mary was eleven years old, her father died, leaving the family in a tough situation. To help out, Mary left school and continued her dangerous hobby of collecting trinkets to sell. She spent her days hiking, climbing, and dodging rocks as they tumbled down the crumbling cliffs. She nimbly avoided tides and crashing waves along the beach. Mary continued to sell fossils, rocks, and seashells—so many that the tongue twister “She sells seashells by the seashore” was written about her!

She soon made her most important discovery. After a storm, she spotted something interesting. Mary used her hammer and chiseled out something big. And strange.

It was a skeleton of a creature nobody had ever seen before! It had the head of a crocodile, the body of a lizard, flippers, and a shark’s tail.

Mary had discovered an ichthyosaurus, which is Latin for “fish lizard.” The word “dinosaur” didn’t even exist at that time. She hired workmen to carry it to her home. A wealthy businessman bought it and placed it on display in a museum.

Her find shook up the scientific world in many ways. Before this, nobody had realized a species could become extinct. The skeleton was two hundred million years old, which shattered the previously held belief that the earth was only six thousand years old. And paleontology, an entirely new field of study, was born. Scientists were forced to accept the fact that the natural world changed over time.

Mary continued to scour the cliffs for fossils and made even more astonishing discoveries! She found an almost complete plesiosaur or “near lizard.” She also found a fossil that was the missing link between stingrays and sharks. And some of the interesting stones that she collected turned out not to be stones at all! They were actually bezoars—essentially, mineral-laden hairballs formerly believed to have medicinal properties.

Many of Mary’s fossils have since been displayed in museums and have been written about in books and journals by geologists and scientists. But at that time, Mary didn’t receive any credit. And not because it wasn’t deserved—but because she was a woman.

Just as the natural world changes over time, however, so has the attitude about women scientists—thanks in part to the daring discoveries of Mary Anning!

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