The Geological Lioness and the Sound of the Sea, The Life and Legacy of Mary Anning Introduction: The Daughter of the Cliffs The story of Mary Anning (1799–1847) is one of profound paradox: a self-educated, working-class woman who single-handedly reshaped the understanding of deep time and extinction, yet who remains popularly and somewhat reductively known only through the alliterative cadence of a children’s rhyme: “ She sells seashells on the seashore .” Born and raised in the modest seaside town of Lyme Regis, along what is now England’s famed Jurassic Coast, Anning emerged from abject poverty to become the world’s foremost expert on Jurassic marine fossils. Her discoveries the first correctly identified Ichthyosaur, the first complete Plesiosaur, and the first Pterosaur found outside of Germany provided irrefutable physical evidence that validated the emerging, and controversial, science of paleontology. Her work forced a reckoning with biblical chronology and established the co...