Yet there was a woman, also raised religious, who blazed the trail for Darwin””an often forgotten and dismissed fossil hunter who, too, was surely tortured by her own bizarre discoveries. Born in 1799, Mary Anning, the dirt-poor woman said to have inspired the tongue-twister “She Sells Sea Shells by the Seashore,” would spend her entire life uncovering and piecing together the fossils of one never-before-seen monsters””monsters that had been hidden away for nearly 200 million years in the cliffs up and down England’s southern coastline.
After her father died in 1810, a young Anning, in order to put food on her table, was forced to run the shore’s gantlet of high tides and landslides, dressed in tattered skirts, as she hunted for curiosities she could sell to seafaring tourists, mostly from London. By birthright, Anning never should have grown up to be an influential fossil hunter and geologist. She was marginalized not only by her family’s poverty but by her sex, her regional dialect and her nearly complete lack of schooling. But she enjoyed one natural advantage: the very good fortune of having been born in exactly the right place at the right time, alongside some of the most geologically unstable coastline in the world; it was””and still is””a place permeated with fossils.