My name is Mary Anning, and just as fossils are forgotten for many years, so too was I. As a child I walked the seafront with my father and brother to find what we then called curiosities.

Mary Anning was a pioneering palaeontologist and fossil collector. Her lifetime was a constellation of firsts. Mary Anning was born in 1799 in Lyme Regis, in the southwest English county of Dorset.

Skull of the ichthyosaur Temnodontosaurus platydon, the first ever discovered. Mary Anning's brother Joseph found the skull in 1810 and Mary found parts of the neck a year later. Our collection ...