Jurassic Mary

The famous fossil collector, Mary Anning seems to be in the news very often these days. She was featured in Tori Herridge's Channel 4 programme about the Dorset Coast recently.

Spinster Mary Anning, uneducated and poor, was of the wrong sex, wrong class and wrong religion, but fate decreed that she was exactly the right person in the right place and time to pioneer the emerging science of palaeontology, the study of fossils. Born in Lyme Regis in 1799, Mary learned to collect fossils with her cabinet-maker father. The unstable cliffs and stealthy sea made the task dangerous but after her father died the sale of fossils sustained her family.