Mary Anning's She Sells Sea Shells

The tongue twister “She Sells Sea Shells” is one of the best known of its genre. Implied by its title, the tongue twister simply concerns a woman that scours the beach and sells the shells that she finds. Mary Anning was a young woman born to a working class family that lived in Lyme Regis, a small seaside town in England. She grew up helping her father comb the beaches for fossils they would sell to tourists. Even after her father died, Mary kept up the fossil collecting practice in order to sustain her mother and brother. But what started out as a means of survival for the Annings turned out to impact the world of paleontology in the early 19th century, though Mary was rarely credited for her finds. The credit typically went to her male colleagues

Following her father’s death, Mary was the primary supporter of her mother Molly and her brother Joseph. Their poverty was dire enough that they were living off of parish relief for several years . So when Mary made her first significant discovery of a marine reptile related to dinosaurs that would be christened Ichthyosaurus, it was nothing more than a financial gain to them, as Mary and her family sold the creature’s bones to a local for 23 pounds . The fossil changed hands several times before eventually being sold to the British Museum where its significance was recognized. The Fossil Hunter by Shelly Emling emphasizes the importance of Mary’s early find. Emling’s book mentions how Sir Everard Home, Britain’s leading anatomist analyzed the fossil. The creature was so strange, he was unable to put it into a specific category. Despite its very fish-like anatomy, it also had bones around the eye socket previously only seen in birds . Home eventually gave an address concerning the fossil, but never gave Mary credit for finding it. And she was not given credit either during the time that the Ichthyosaurus was displayed in the Egyptian Hall in the British Museum