In the early 1800s, visitors to Lyme Regis, a small seaside town on the south coast of England, could buy an unusual souvenir from a table outside a carpenter's home: a stone snail, a curled shell or, with luck, a piece of bone far older than anyone could imagine.
The table belonged to the Anning family, who were poor even by the standards of the time, and the sharpest eyes among them belonged to a girl named Mary.
Born in 1799, Mary learned from her father to search the crumbling cliffs for the fossils that winter storms washed out of the rock, but he died in 1810, leaving the family deeply in debt.
Collecting was no longer a hobby; it was how they paid for bread.
In 1811 Mary's brother Joseph dug out a strange skull with a long, narrow snout and enormous eye sockets.
About a year later Mary, then only twelve or thirteen, uncovered the rest of the skeleton.
The creature, later named an ichthyosaur, or “fish lizard,” looked like a cross between a dolphin and a crocodile, and it caused a sensation in London.
It was only the beginning.
In 1823 Mary found the first complete skeleton of a plesiosaur, a sea reptile with a tiny head and an almost impossibly long neck.
The animal looked so unlikely that Georges Cuvier, the most famous anatomist in Europe, suspected at first that it was a fake, put together from the bones of different creatures.
Only after experts in London had examined it closely did he accept that it was genuine.
Five years later she found the first flying reptile ever discovered in Britain.
What set Mary apart was not luck but knowledge.
She had very little schooling, yet she taught herself anatomy and geology, copying out scientific papers by hand, drawings included, and cutting up modern fish to understand how ancient ones had been built.
A woman who visited her in 1824 noted in a diary that the remarkable thing about this young woman was that, the moment she found a bone, she knew what kind of animal it belonged to.
Leading geologists walked the beach with her, wrote to her for advice and bought her finds.
Yet when those finds were described in scientific journals, her name rarely appeared.
The wealthy men who bought the fossils presented them to learned societies, and the credit tended to go to them.
Mary noticed, for example, that certain stones often found inside ichthyosaur skeletons contained fish bones and scales when broken open, and concluded that they were fossilized droppings.
It was an Oxford professor, William Buckland, who published the finding and gave these stones their scientific name.
As a woman, and a working-class one, she could not join the Geological Society of London, which did not admit women until long after her death.
In one letter she wrote that the world had used her so unkindly that she feared it had made her suspicious of everyone.
Her situation improved in later life, partly thanks to scientific friends who raised money on her behalf, and after her death in 1847 the president of the Geological Society paid tribute to her in a speech, an honor almost unheard of for someone who could never have joined.
She is often said, though without firm evidence, to be the girl behind the tongue twister “She sells seashells by the seashore.”
Whether or not that is true, the line captures something real: a young woman on a windy beach, seeing in what she sold far more than her customers ever could.