From Scenes from Deep Time by Martin J.S. Rudwick
Until recently, opportunities for women in science have been relatively few. The Geological Society of London — perhaps the most important organization for geologists and paleontologists in the early 19th century — didn't admit any women, not even as members' guests. Still, women have made significant contributions to the field.
From Scenes from Deep Time by Martin J.S. Rudwick |
This tongue-twister has a very real inspiration. The daughter of a working class English fossil collector, Mary Anning expanded her father's business after his untimely death left the family nearly destitute in the early 19th century. With an exceptional eye for fossils, she unearthed a number of spectacular finds from sediments that were deposited during the Jurassic Period.
Many of Anning's grateful customers were upper class English geologists. When hard financial times dropped Anning's sales around 1830, one of those geologists, Henry De la Beche, drew a cartoon designed to inspire interest in her finds. Named Dura antiquior ("an earlier Dorset"), this lively depiction was converted to a lithograph and sold to many members of the Geological Society of London. A commercial collector, Anning was not considered a scientist, although many scientists of the time admired her work.
To learn more about Mary Anning, choose Mary Anning's Biography.
 From Hunting Dinosaurs by Louie Psihoyos |
 From Hunting Dinosaurs by Louie Psihoyos |
One day, as the story goes, Mary Ann Mantell accompanied her country doctor husband on a house call. While he visited his patient, she took a stroll down a country lane and found a tooth that she presented to her husband after he finished his visit. Whether this story is true can't be confirmed since Gideon Mantell later gave conflicting versions of the story. What is known is that the tooth in question led to the naming of Iguanodon, and Mary Ann collected a number of fossils for her husband. She also illustrated much of his work. The couple did not, however, live happily ever after; after 23 years of marriage, they separated.
To learn more about Mantell's find, choose Gideon Mantell's Biography.
 From Human Origins: The Search for Our Beginnings by Herbert Thomas |
Mary Nicol married Louis Leakey in the 1930s and spent much of the rest of her life digging fossils in the African bush. Success came slowly, and when it arrived, Louis Leakey often got most of the attention. While her husband did the lecture circuit in Europe and the United States, Mary Leakey continued to dig. Over the years, her finds included Proconsul, Australopithecus boisei, Homo habilis and early hominid footprints known as the Laetoli footprints. Here, Louis and Mary (whose face is covered by her hat) carefully excavate bone fragments of the Zinjanthropus skull.
To learn more about Mary Leakey, choose Mary Leakey's Biography.
 From Hunting for Dinosaurs by Zofia Kielan-Jaworowska |
The United States has a reputation for offering the greatest equality to men and women, yet several years before the U.S. women's movement, a woman from Poland was successfully leading a series of paleontological excavations in Mongolia. To learn more, see Zofia Kielan-Jaworowska's Biography.
 From the Auckland Museum New Zealand |
Joan Wiffen started prospecting for fossils near her New Zealand home in the early 1970s. In 1975, she found a bone fragment that looked like a vertebra, but she couldn't positively identify it. That the bone might belong to a dinosaur didn't seem likely; conventional wisdom held that the country just didn't have dinosaurs. But when Wiffen spotted a similar bone on a paleontologist's office desk in Australia, conventional wisdom had to change. To learn more, see Joan Wiffen's biography.
For more information:
Mary Anning
Gideon Mantell
Mary Leakey
Zofia Kielan-Jaworowska
Joan Wiffen
Narrative text and graphic design © by Michon Scott - Updated August 1, 2009