Mary Anning

She was born on this date in Lyme Regis, Dorset, England in 1799. She was one of 10 children, but they were a poor family and eight of her nine siblings died before reaching adulthood.

At the age of just 12, Mary discovered a 5.2m (17ft) skeleton, now known to be an ichthyosaur. Twelve years later, she found the first complete skeleton of a plesiosaur; a marine reptile so bizarre that scientists thought it was a fake. She also unearthed the UK's first known remains of a pterosaur; believed to be the largest-ever flying animal.

Mary Anning was three things you didn't want to be in 19th-century Britain - she was female, working class and poor. As a result, the fossils tended to be credited to museums in the name of the rich man that paid for them.

Anning remained in hardship and died of breast cancer in 1847 at the age of 47. She is buried at St Michael the Archangel Church in Lyme Regis.

Three years after her death, members of the British Geological Society paid for a stained glass window to be placed in the church where she was buried in her memory.

In 2020, a movie on her life came out called “Ammonite: Who was the real Mary Anning?” starring Kate Winslet and Saoirse Ronan.