Google Doodle Celebrates Mary Anning, British Paleontologist

Google honored British paleontologist Mary Anning on May 21 with a Doodle that celebrated her life and career.

Mary Anning’s Google Doodle

In the Doodle, Anning is depicted in a long green coat and tan hat, a fossil brush in hand as the image of a dinosaur skull emerges. To her right side rests a bucket with picks and shovels. “Google” abstractly appears in the bones that are poking up out of the earth.

Anning worked in the scientific field of paleontology two centuries ago, excelling in the field, yet not achieving the same notoriety and celebrated successes as her male counterparts. Anning was drawn to the paleontology while growing up in Southwest Britain, where she began to discover prehistoric fossils – ichthyosaur, plesiosaur and pterosaur skeletons – in Dorset’s Blue Lias cliffs.

In addition to the setbacks and discrimination Anning faced because of her gender were two more: she was poor and she came from a family of religious dissenters. Largely due to those three realities, Anning’s contribution to the filed of paleontology went without credit and her scientific writing on her findings unpublished.

At the time of Anning’s death in 1847 at age 47, she had yet to be recognized for her work. However, in 2010, the Royal Society, acknowledging what she’d done for the field of paleontology, named her as her as one of the 10 most important British women in science.