That scientific revolution began in particular with a young English girl named Mary Anning. Mary was a tough, smart kid from a poor family. The Anning family made money by selling fossils they found in the cliffs near their seaside town.
Mary’s life was hard and dangerous even when she was a child. Bizarrely, she was struck by lightning when she was just a baby. On another occasion she almost drowned. Her father died before she turned 11, leaving Mary, her brother, and her mother to struggle in poverty. She spent most of her life climbing cliffs, wandering beaches, and hammering rocks in the rain and cold, searching for fossils to sell to survive.
That’s how Mary made her first great scientific discovery when she was only 12 years old. The previous year her brother had spotted a fossil skull from an unfamiliar creature. Mary located the rest of the skeleton in 1811. It was an animal unlike anything on Earth—a sea reptile with a body shaped like a shark! This became the first specimen of “ichthyosaur” (“fish lizard”) to be described and correctly understood by science. Mary later found several more ichthyosaur skeletons.