But none of them provided any evidence for their claim. To be honest, there was one problem: the hook on which most of these blogs hung their story was the assertion that Mary Anning was the inspiration for the tongue twister “she sells seashells on the seashore.” Most of them even included the tongue-twister connection in the title of the blog post. Normally, I’d love the way this story spread. It has everything: pioneer women scientists, Regency and Victorian England, beachcombing, fossils…it’s like Pride and Prejudice at the beach, with feminism, dinosaurs, and poop jokes. She also figured out that some of the rocks she was finding and breaking open were fossilized feces, becoming one of the discoverers of the coprolite! Because she was a woman, and working class, and a religious minority to boot, she was not always recognized for her achievements, and many of her discoveries were published by Anglican male scientists. Anning was a woman from a working-class family her father, a cabinetmaker, was mentioned by Jane Austen in 1804. Despite her lack of formal education, Anning was involved in the discovery of several categories of ancient animals, including the ichthyosaur, the plesiosaur, and the pterosaur.
Some of my favorite blogs and magazines got in on the act: Atlas Obscura, QI ( Quite Interesting), Dangerous Women, Cracked, and Forbes, to name just a few, published versions of the Mary Anning story. This version resides in the Geological Society in London, and the image is in the public domain.Ī little while back, the internet was abuzz with the inspirational story of Mary Anning, a pioneering 19 th-century paleontologist from Lyme Regis in England. Donne, who knew Mary Anning personally, and is itself a copy of a painting done in 1842 by an unknown artist. The picture is an 1850 pastel drawing by B. Was Mary Anning the inspiration for “she sells seashells on the seashore?” We’ll take a closer look in this post.
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