The Fossil Hunter: Dinosaurs, Evolution, and the Woman Whose Discoveries Changed the World

Name: The Fossil Hunter: Dinosaurs, Evolution, and the Woman Whose Discoveries Changed the World
Price: 18.12 USD
Availability: InStock
Author: Shelley Emling
ISBN: 9780230103429

Mary Anning was only twelve years old when, in 1811, she discovered the first dinosaur skeleton -- the bones of an ichthyosaur -- while fossil hunting on the cliffs of Lyme Regis, England. Until Mary's incredible discovery, it was widely believed that animals did not become extinct. She attracted the attention of fossil collectors and eventually the scientific world. Mary's peculiar finds helped lay the groundwork for Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, laid out in his On the Origin of Species. Darwin drew on Mary's fossilized creatures as irrefutable evidence that life in the past was nothing like life in the present.

A story worthy of Dickens, The Fossil Hunter chronicles the life of this young girl, with dirt under her fingernails and not a shilling to buy dinner, who became a world-renowned paleontologist. Here at last, Shelley Emling returns Mary Anning, of whom Stephen J. Gould remarked, is "probably the most important unsung (or inadequately sung) collecting force in the history of paleontology," to her deserved place in history.