This is Before the Microscope, I am Dalia Fouad. Today we go to a cold beach in the south of England in 1811, where a twelve-year-old girl and her brother are digging a skull out of a cliff that collapses every winter. Mary Anning sold fossils to survive. The men who bought them wrote the papers, named the species and joined the societies she was not allowed to enter. But the animals she found, the ichthyosaur, the plesiosaur that the great Cuvier declared a forgery until he saw it, changed what naturalists were willing to believe about extinction. I will tell you what the letters and ledgers actually say, and a palaeontologist will explain how her name is used now. You are listening on Witspeak Podcasts. Mind the tide.