Mary Anning
Why are bones of animals that don't exist buried in the ground?
That time, that place
The daughter of a poor carpenter. Her father dug fossils from the sea cliffs to sell to visitors, and when he died she took over the work at eleven and supported the family.
The cliffs at Lyme Regis were dangerous. New fossils surface after a storm — which is exactly when the cliffs are most likely to collapse. A landslide once killed her dog.
Why this question
What she pulled out matched no known animal. Nothing in scripture, nothing alive.
So what were they? Why were the bones of animals that do not exist buried in the ground?
What was found
She found the first complete ichthyosaur skeleton, the first plesiosaur, and the first pterosaur discovered in Britain.
Not merely dug them out. She worked out how the bones articulated and laid them correctly, and recognized that certain puzzling lumps were fossilized dung — from which what the animal ate can be read.
Scholars wrote papers on her finds. Her name did not appear on them. As a woman she could not join the Geological Society, which neither admitted her nor credited her as an author.
The bones she recovered made extinction thinkable: that there are creatures that once lived and are gone.
Animals that do not exist now could never have lived
Complete ichthyosaur and plesiosaur skeletons, and fossilized dung
The Geological Society admitted women in 1904, fifty-seven years after her death