ever heard of Mary Anning? she "blazed the trail" for Charles Darwin

From Shelley Emling in the WSJ, the story of...

...a woman, also raised religious, who blazed the trail for Darwin—an often forgotten and dismissed fossil hunter who, too, was surely tortured by her own bizarre discoveries. Born in 1799, Mary Anning, the dirt-poor woman said to have inspired the tongue-twister "She Sells Sea Shells by the Seashore," would spend her entire life uncovering and piecing together the fossils of one never-before-seen monsters...

After her father died in 1810, a young Anning, in order to put food on her table, was forced to run the shore's gantlet of high tides and landslides, dressed in tattered skirts, as she hunted for curiosities she could sell to seafaring tourists, mostly from London. By birthright, Anning never should have grown up to be an influential fossil hunter and geologist. She was marginalized not only by her family's poverty but by her sex, her regional dialect and her nearly complete lack of schooling. But she enjoyed one natural advantage: the very good fortune of having been born in exactly the right place at the right time, alongside some of the most geologically unstable coastline in the world; it was—and still is—a place permeated with fossils...

...the fossils that Anning uncovered as a young woman—including many of the world's first ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs and pterodactyls—had never been seen by anyone, anywhere before.

One can only imagine how frightening it must have been to find the fragments of these exotic creatures—with their bat-like wings, snake-like necks, and big, bulging eyes...

But according to most accounts from her friends, Anning continued to be a deeply meditative woman who often could be found praying or reading the Bible and who almost never missed a Sunday service....

Anning tried to reconcile what she was unearthing with her belief in God's omnipotence, a belief she apparently held until her death from breast cancer at the age of 47....