Of recent years there has been an admission of this:  she even appears on a 2010 series of Royal Mint stamps celebrating women scientists, and her life has been documented in some detail.  But it took a long time:  ..."one of the meanest disgraces of British palaeontology is that although many scientists of the day gratefully used her finds to establish their own reputation, not one native type bears the specific anningii."¹ Anning had three strikes against her:  she was female, she was working-class, and she was a Dissenter (a non-Church of England Protestant).  All three attributes banned her from all but a basic education and from social acceptance among the wealthy amateur scientists of her day.  True, she gained a reputation and a limited degree of acceptance during her later lifetime (she was only 47 when she died of cancer), but it tended, and still tends, to be of the patronising and dismissive "look what a clever girl despite her crippling disadvantages!" kind which led Rosalind Franklin, for example, to throw things.

 Anning was born and lived all her life on what is now known as the Jurassic Coast, at Lyme in Dorset.  The family were very poor, and in order to supplement their income, father, mother and children (along with many other local people) took to collecting and selling to tourists the locally abundant fossil remains which regularly fell (and still fall) out of the blue lias cliffs characteristic of that coast.  Some of these curios, sold on, ended up in the hands of eminent palaeontologists.

 Uniquely, as far as is known, among these local collectors, Anning both realised the importance of what was being found, and attempted to go about her trade in a systematic and responsible way.  She read everything she could get her hands on about the subject of palaeontology, then in its infancy, and even copied out in longhand texts which she needed to keep for reference.  She learned to dissect modern species such as cuttlefish in order to help make sense of the remains she found.  Many eminent British scientists of the day acquired specimens from Anning, directly or indirectly, but it was a Swiss-American, Louis Agassiz, who alone acknowledged her contribution to the subject by naming a species (in fact, two species) after her:  Acrodus anningiae and Belenostomus anningiae.

 Anning was the first to discover an ichthyosaur skeleton in an identifiable form, the first to discover a plesiosaur skeleton, among many others.  She is credited with the discovery, through her own observations, that the odd-shaped stones then called bezoar stones were, in fact, coprolites (fossilised faeces), and that belemnites, like modern Sepiidae, contained ink sacs.  But, during her lifetime, few recognised her contribution while taking advantage of her expertise. She herself was well aware that she was being sidelined: to a friend she complained that “these men of learning have sucked her brains.....while she derived none of the advantages.”  Disqualified on grounds of sex from membership of the prime forum of the time for her subject, the British Geological Society, Anning produced only one scientific publication, a short letter to the Magazine of Natural History [ now the Journal of Natural History] on a disputed identification.²

Anning was duly eulogized after her death, but still in the main as one who inexplicably overcame the perceived disadvantages of her sex and class, rather than as an, admittedly self-taught, scientist in her own right.

¹Thus John Fowles, The French Lieutenant's Woman (Triad/Panther books, 1977, p.44).

²Annals & Magazine of Natural History, Vol III, April 7, 1839, p. 605