Mary Anning: She Sells Seashells by the Seashore

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Katherine Hamilton portraying Mary Anning (Natural History Museum)

The tongue-twister that none of us can say…did you know that it is more than just an impossible to pronounce sentence? The tongue-twister actually refers to a real person, a person who did much more than simply sell seashells. The ‘she’ in the tongue-twister is Mary Anning, one of the foremost fossil hunters who contributed greatly to the emerging field of paleontology. Yet Anning’s work was largely ignored by the scientific community because of her gender and her low socio-economic background.