Mary Anning

Palaeontologist Mary Anning found some of the first known fossils of ancient animals such as ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs and pterosaurs, before the term “dinosaur” had been invented. Anning lived in Lyme Regis, a seaside resort in a part of England now called the Jurassic Coast and recognised as a World Heritage Site.

Her family was poor and she had little formal education. Her father collected and sold fossils and taught her how to find them, but he died when she was just 11. One year later, Anning and her brother Joseph found and excavated their first ichthyosaur, a five metre-long marine reptile that lived around 200 million years ago.

In 1823, Anning discovered the first complete skeleton of a plesiosaur, another reptile that replaced ichthyosaurs as the sea’s top predators in the Jurassic period. That was followed by a pterosaur in 1928 – the first found outside Germany. She was also the first to identify fossilised faeces, known as coprolites.

As a lower-class woman at a time when science was the preserve of privileged men, Anning rarely got the credit she deserved for her discoveries. The Geological Society finally made her an honorary member in 1846, one year before her death from breast cancer.