On England's stormy shore, a teenager uncovered bones that made people reconsider what had once lived on Earth.
Mary Anning grew up poor in Lyme Regis, where she learned to find and prepare fossils. In 1811, her brother Joseph found a strange skull; Mary then spent months tracing and excavating the five-metre skeleton. The animal was eventually identified as an ichthyosaur, an extinct marine reptile. Her careful finds helped make fossils central to the emerging study of Earth's ancient life.
Anning later found the first complete plesiosaur skeleton and remains of a pterosaur outside Germany. Yet scientific societies excluded women, and scholars who bought or studied her specimens often failed to credit her. The Natural History Museum notes that she taught herself geology and anatomy and that her finds fueled public interest in palaeontology.
Her work sits at the intersection of patience, expertise, and access: who gets to collect evidence, and whose name gets attached to it?