Statue of fossil-hunting pioneer Mary Anning to be unveiled in Dorset

A nine-year-old asked her mother a question. The statue of Mary Anning, the pioneer Victorian fossil hunter who lived and worked in the town, was located in their hometown.

Anya Pearson was forced to tell her daughter that there wasn't one. Her lifetime of discoveries may have shaped the emerging science of palaeontology, but in her own town and farther away, she had been.

The statue of Anning will be unveiled on Saturday, thanks to a campaign started by Pearson and Evie Swire, who asked if there was a statue of her.

The pair describe the moment as particularly sweet, having overcome planning and Covid delays, been forced twice to find a new site, and crowdfunded more than 150,000 through their Mary Anning Rocks campaign.

Evie says she knew it was going to happen, but she is very proud of it. She would be very pleased that she was finally getting the recognition that she deserved.

Anning was born in 1799 into a family that scratched its living from the coast around the emerging resort of Lyme Regis, digging fossils from the dangerously crumbling cliffs and selling them to collectors and museums. Her finds include the first complete plesiosaur skeleton and the first pterosaur found in Britain.

Alice Roberts, a supporter of the statue campaign since the beginning, says that she was more than a bone hunter.

She wasn't just a fossil collector, and this is important. She understood what she was looking for, but she couldn't be a member of any of the learned societies of the time.

Roberts notes that Anning wasn't given full credit for her expertise, but that she was well known in her time. There were still plenty of women involved in science and writing about it in the 19th century, even though there weren't as many men.

Mary Anning feels that the tide is beginning to turn, and that's right. The Natural History Museum in London has a suite of rooms named after Anning, who was added to the primary curriculum in the past few years. Ammonite, a film about her life, will be released in 2020.

She is in really safe hands because she knows who she is.

The campaign has shown us that there is a lot of love out there for historically forgotten women. There are at least eight other projects currently under way, with others inspired to campaign to raise their own statues. We get shit done!

For Roberts, who will unveil the statue, accompanied by her own 12-year-old daughter, it's important for girls to hear these stories. The history of science is not exclusively male and it is important for our boys to hear those stories.