Mary Annings 215th birth anniversary celebrates Google 

Internet giant Google on Wednesday honoured British fossil collector Mary Anning on her 215th birth anniversary.

Visitors on the homepage were treated with a doodle that features Anning searching for fossils, with the remains of animals making up the word Google finally.Anning is best known for her work collecting fossils from the Jurassic period near her home in Lyme Regis Dorset.

Born on May 21st 1799, Anning contributed to fundamental changes that occurred during her lifetime in scientific thinking about prehistoric life and the history of the Earth. Her first discovery was a skull, when she was just twelve, along with her brother Joseph.

According to Wikipedia, the palaeontologist became known around the world for important finds she made in the Jurassic marine fossil beds at Lyme Regis in Dorset, where she lived. Despite her popularity in Britain, Europe and America, Mary Anning couldn't make it to the Geological Society of London on account of her gender.

Mary Anning died of breast cancer at the age of 47 in 1847. She was named one of the ten most influential women in the history of science. She has also had three species named in her honour.

Mary Anning was a British fossil collector, dealer, and palaeontologist who became known around the world for important findings she made in the Jurassic marine fossil beds at Lyme Regis in Dorset, a county in Southwest England on the coast of the English Channel, where she lived. Her work contributed to fundamental changes that occurred during her lifetime in scientific thinking about prehistoric life and the history of the Earth.

Mary Anning searched for fossils in the area's Blue Lias cliffs, particularly during the winter months when landslides exposed new fossils that had to be collected quickly before they were lost to the sea. It was dangerous work, and she nearly lost her life in 1833 during a landslide that killed her dog, Tray. Her discoveries included the first ichthyosaur skeleton correctly identified, which she and her brother Joseph found when she was just twelve years old; the first two plesiosaur skeletons found; the first pterosaur skeleton located outside Germany; and important fish fossils. Her observations played a key role in the discovery that coprolites, known as bezoar stones at the time, were fossilised faeces. She also discovered that belemnite fossils contained fossilised ink sacs like those of modern cephalopods. When geologist Henry De la Beche painted Duria Antiquior, the first widely circulated pictorial representation of a scene from prehistoric life derived from fossil reconstructions, he based it largely on fossils Anning had found, and sold prints of it for her benefit.

Anning's gender and social class prevented her from fully participating in the scientific community of 19th-century Britain, dominated as it was by wealthy Anglican gentlemen. She struggled financially for much of her life. Her family was poor, and as religious dissenters, were subject to legal discrimination. Her father, a cabinetmaker, died when she was eleven.

She became well known in geological circles in Britain, Europe, and America, and was consulted on issues of anatomy as well as about collecting fossils. Nonetheless, as a woman, she was not eligible to join the Geological Society of London and she did not always receive full credit for her scientific contributions. Indeed, she wrote in a letter: "The world has used me so unkindly, I fear it has made me suspicious of everyone." The only scientific writing of hers published in her lifetime appeared in the Magazine of Natural History in 1839, an extract from a letter that Anning had written to the magazine's editor questioning one of its claims. After her death in 1847, her unusual life story attracted increasing interest. Charles Dickens wrote of her in 1865 that "[t]he carpenter's daughter has won a name for herself, and has deserved to win it." In 2010, one hundred and sixty-three years after her death, the Royal Society included Anning in a list of the ten British women who have most influenced the history of science.


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