More Mary Anning for her birthday.

More Mary Anning for her birthday. This is the Ichthyosaurus species, Temnodontosaurus, she and her brother discovered. It was not the first ever found, but it was the first ever seriously studied. Of course no one writing papers on it ever mentioned who had collected it and meticulously prepared the fossil. The only person worth mentioning was the rich lord who bought it from Anning.

This thing was 40 feet long. Totally worthy of a #rollforinitiative .

Another fun fact, Mary Anning was the first one to suggest that the fossilized masses of fish bones found in the abdomen of ichthyosauruses were actually fossilized shit. Coprolites. It’s serendipitous that I just learned that before Mary discovered what they really were, they were called bezoar stones. Abby and I just read the part of Harry Potter where Professor Snape asks Harry what a bezoar was. They were traditionally thought to counteract poison. It is so amusing to me to imagine some old-timey lord dropping a hunk of fossilized lizard shit in his wine to protect him against poison. So there’s a magic item for you too.