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Palgrave MacMillan FOSSIL HUNTER by Shelley Emling
At a time when women were excluded from science a young girl made a discovery that marked the birth of paleontology and continues to feed the debate about evolution to this day. Mary Anning was only twelve years old when in 1811 she discovered the first dinosaur skeleton of an ichthyosaur while 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.show more