MARY Anning was born at the end of the 18th century and lived until the middle of the 19th - a meagre 48 years - with her family in Lyme Regis, Dorset.

But during those years, beginning as a passionate child collecting fossils and continuing her father's passion after his death, she worked with the leading scientists of the day to ensure England's place in the forefront of the developing field of palaeontology.

Now, 150 years after her death, her life is still largely shrouded in mystery and misrepresentation. Her discoveries helped to form the foundations of palaeontology and she was quite possibly the first professional fossil collector, as well as being widely acknowledged as the first woman palaeontologist - but the true importance of her work and contributions to the field is probably still not yet fully recognised.

Anning lived through an early life of privation and hardship to become what one source called "the greatest fossilist the world ever knew".

Anning is credited with finding the first specimen of Ichthyosaurus acknowledged by the Geological Society in London. She also discovered the first nearly complete example of the Plesiosaurus, the first British Pterodactylus macronyx, a fossil flying reptile, the Squaloraja fossil fish, a transitional link between sharks and rays, and finally the Plesiosaurus macrocephalus.

But her own history is incomplete and contradictory. Some accounts of her life have been fictionalised, and her childhood discoveries have been mythologised.

She was a curiosity in her own time, bringing tourism to her home town of Lyme Regis (the children's tongue twisting rhyme "She sells sea shells on the sea shore" was all about Anning and her fossil enterprise).

Only her personal qualities and her long experience brought her any recognition at all, since she was a woman, of a lower social class, and from a provincial area at a time when upper-class London men - gentlemanly scholars - received the bulk of the credit for most geological discoveries.

Anning learned to collect fossils from her father, Richard, a cabinet maker by trade and a fossil collector by vocation. But he died at age 44 in 1810, leaving his family destitute. They relied on charity to survive.

Fossil collecting was a dangerous business in the seaside town. Anning walked and waded under unstable cliffs at low tide, looking for specimens dislodged from the rocks. During her teenage years, the family built both a reputation and a business as fossil hunters. In 1817 they met Lieutenant-Colonel Thomas Birch, a well-to-do fossil collector who became a supporter of the family.

He attributed major discoveries in the area to them, and arranged to sell his personal collection of fossils for the family's benefit. Most of Anning's fossils were sold to institutions and private collectors, but museums tended to credit only people who donated the fossils to the institution.

Therefore, it has been difficult for historians to trace many fossils that Mary Anning located; the best known are a small Ichthyosaurus discovered in 1821 and the first Plesiosaurus, unearthed in 1823.

Mary did have some recognition for her intellectual mastery of the anatomy of her subjects from Lady Harriet Silvester, who visited Anning in 1824 and 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 in this kingdom."

Visitors to Lyme increased as Anning won the respect of contemporary scientists. In the last decade of her life she received an annuity from the British Association for the Advancement of Science (1838). The Geological Society of London collected a stipend for her and she was named the first honorary member of the new Dorset County Museum, one year before her death from breast cancer. Her obituary was published in the Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society - an organisation that did not admit women until 1904.

Mary Anning: Born Lyme Regis, May 21, 1799. Died: Lyme Regis, March 9, 1847

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