Mary Anning · Science

The Outsider Who Supplied the Science

Anning was poor, self-taught, a woman, and a religious Dissenter - barred from the universities and the scientific society that debated her finds. She dissected, drew, and understood specimens that gentlemen named and published, and her case has become the classic reckoning with scientific credit.

What you'll be able to recall

You learned that Anning supplied the empirical foundation of a science that excluded her: barred by class, sex, and religion from the Geological Society (which admitted no women until 1904), she found and read specimens that others published, and reportedly said the world had ‘used her ill.’ Explain what h…

Leads to Charles Darwin.

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