Mary Anning

Anning's family sold fossils from the crumbling cliffs at Lyme Regis to tourists, a trade that kept them barely fed. She was twelve when she and her brother uncovered the first ichthyosaur skeleton to be properly described, and she went on to find the first two complete plesiosaurs and the first pterosaur outside Germany. The work was done in winter, when landslips expose new rock, and it nearly killed her more than once; a slide in 1833 buried her dog beside her.

She read every paper she could obtain, copied them out by hand, dissected modern fish and squid for comparison, and worked out what coprolites were. Geologists came to Lyme to consult her and then published her finds under their own names without acknowledgement. As a woman and a Dissenter she could not join the Geological Society or vote in it, and she said so in a letter: the world had used her ill. She died of breast cancer at forty-seven. The vicar and some members of the Geological Society put a window in her parish church in her memory, and its president, Henry De la Beche, read a eulogy to the society and printed it in its transactions — the first it had ever given a woman. The society did not admit women until 1904.