The Fossil Hunter: Dinosaurs, Evolution, and the Woman Whose Discoveries Changed the World (MacSci)

Mary Anning was only twelve years old when, in 1811, she discovered the first dinosaur skeletonof an ichthyosaurwhile fossil hunting on the cliffs of Lyme Regis, England. Until Marys incredible discovery, it was widely believed that animals did not become extinct. The child of a poor family, Mary became a fossil hunter, inspiring the tonguetwister, She Sells Sea Shells by the Seashore. She attracted the attention of fossil collectors and eventually the scientific world. Once news of the fossils reached the halls of academia, it became impossible to ignore the truth. Marys peculiar finds helped lay the groundwork for Charles Darwins theory of evolution, laid out in his On the Origin of Species. Darwin drew on Marys fossilized creatures as irrefutable evidence that life in the past was nothing like life in the present.A story worthy of Dickens, The Fossil Hunter chronicles the life of this young girl, with dirt under her fingernails and not a shilling to buy dinner, who became a worldrenowned paleontologist. Dickens himself said of Mary: The carpenters daughter has won a name for herself, and deserved to win it.Here at last, Shelley Emling returns Mary Anning, of whom Stephen J. Gould remarked, is probably the most important unsung (or inadequately sung) collecting force in the history of paleontology, to her deserved place in history.