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Women in Paleontology

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Since the recognition of fossils as remnants of once-living organisms by early polymaths such as Leonardo da Vinci, paleontology has become the clearest window into the long history of life on Earth. During much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, paleontology was primarily focused on the discovery, naming, and description of fossil plants and animals. Early discoveries of dinosaurs and other large extinct animals brought the field of paleontology to the attention of the general public, and the fascination with these strange creatures of the past has continued to grow. From that time onward, paleontology has come to represent a unique field, providing deep-time perspectives on the biological and geological processes of our planet. Unfortunately, many have thought of paleontology to be a field ruled by men- in the past, and in my time, science was specifically hostile towards women. Even today, we can see that this still hasn’t changed. The arc of hist...
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The Tully Monster

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Every now and again, scientists discover fossils that are so bizarre they defy classification, their body plans unlike any other living animals or plants.  The Tully Monster, a 300 million-year-old fossil is one such creature. Amateur collector Francis Tully found the first of these  fossils  in 1955 in a fossil bed known as the Mazon Creek formation. He took the strange creature to the  Field Museum of Natural History , but  paleontologists  were stumped as to which  phylum   Tullimonstrum  belonged. The species  Tullimonstrum gregarium , "Tully's common monster", as these fossils later were named, takes its genus name from Tully,  whereas the species name,  gregarium , means "common", and reflects its abundance. The term  monstrum  ("monster") relates to the creature's outlandish appearance and strange  body plan . The fossil remained a puzzle, and interpretations likened it to a wo...
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Discoveries

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The Anning family had no skills, except for fossil-finding, passed onto us by our father.  I , Mary Anning and my brother Joseph would go underneath the cliffs, and find small fossils, while our mother ran a small stall selling the fossils to wealthy tourists. This is how the discoveries started. Ichthyosaur My first discovery was when I was aged 12, along with my brother Joseph.  Near the end of 1811, Joseph found an ichthyosaur skull. A few months later, I found the rest of the skeleton. This turned out to be the most complete ichthyosaur at the time! This was a highly significant discovery and we were well-paid for it, although not enough to get out of the financial trouble we had gotten in after our father passed away. I and Joseph’s discovery was used as the basis for the first ever scientific paper written about the ichthyosaur, published in 1814 by Everard Home. (Unfortunately, this article cannot be found anywhere right now.) Us young...
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