The Girl Who Was Struck by Lightning

Mary Anning was one of the most important fossil hunters who ever lived. She discovered the first correctly identified ichthyosaur skeleton at the age of twelve — seventeen feet of ancient sea monster, pulled from the cliffs of Lyme Regis with hand tools. She later found the first complete plesiosaur, a creature so strange that scientists initially accused her of faking it. She found the first British pterosaur. She taught herself anatomy, geology, and French so she could read Cuvier's papers, and leading geologists traveled to Dorset to consult her before publishing their own work.

She could not join the Geological Society of London, attend its meetings, or put her name on a scientific paper.

She went to the cliffs anyway. Every day, in every weather, scanning the rocks that the sea had freshly exposed, racing to extract fossils before the next tide smashed them to pieces. She nearly died in a landslide in 1833 that killed her dog. She went back the next morning.

Her neighbors in Lyme Regis had a theory about where all this came from. In 1800, when Mary was fifteen months old, a neighbor was holding her at an outdoor horse show when lightning struck the group. Three women died instantly. The baby survived.

Before the strike, her family said, she had been sickly and listless. Afterward, she was something else entirely.