Editing Mary Anning (section)

=== Ichthyosaurs ===
[[File:Anning 1st ichthyosaur skeleton.jpg|thumb|alt=Rib, vertebrae, and pelvic bones in a stone matrix|Drawing of part of the skeletal remains of ''Temnodontosaurus platyodon'' (part of specimen NHMUK PV R1158), the first ichthyosaur found by Anning – from Everard Home's 1814 paper]]

Anning's first famous discovery was made shortly after her father's death when she was still a child of about 12. In 1811 (some sources say 1810 or 1809) her brother Joseph found a {{convert|4|ft|m|abbr=on}} skull, but failed to locate the rest of the animal.<ref name="Torrens1995" /> After Joseph told Anning to look between the cliffs at Lyme Regis and Charmouth, she found the skeleton—{{convert|17|ft|abbr=on}} long in all—a few months later. The family hired workmen to dig it out in November that year, an event covered by the local press on 9 November, who identified the fossil as a crocodile.<ref name="Howe12" />

Other [[ichthyosaur]] remains had been discovered in years past at Lyme and elsewhere, but the specimen found by the Annings was the first to come to the attention of scientific circles in London. It was purchased by the lord of a local manor,<ref name=Sharpe15 /> who passed it to [[William Bullock (collector)|William Bullock]] for public display in London<ref name="Torrens1995" /> where it created a sensation. At a time when most people in Britain still believed in a literal interpretation of [[Genesis creation narrative|Genesis]], that the Earth was only a few thousand years old and that species did not evolve or become extinct,<ref name="academy_of_sci">[http://www.ansp.org/museum/jefferson/otherPages/extinction.php "Fossils and Extinction"], The Academy of Natural Sciences. Retrieved 23 September 2010. {{webarchive |url=https://web.archive.org/web/20100505055123/http://www.ansp.org/museum/jefferson/otherPages/extinction.php |date=5 May 2010 }}</ref> the find raised questions in scientific and religious circles about what the new science of geology was revealing about ancient life and the history of the Earth. Its notoriety increased when [[Sir Everard Home, 1st Baronet|Sir Everard Home]] wrote a series of six papers, starting in 1814, describing it for the Royal Society. The papers never mentioned who had collected the fossil, and in the first one he even mistakenly credited the painstaking cleaning and preparation of the fossil performed by Anning to the staff at Bullock's museum.<ref name="Home1814" /><ref>{{Harvnb|Emling|2009|pp=33–41}}</ref> Perplexed by the creature, Home kept changing his mind about its classification, first thinking it was a kind of fish, then thinking it might have some kind of affinity with the [[platypus|duck-billed platypus]] (only recently known to science); finally in 1819 he reasoned it might be a kind of intermediate form between salamanders and lizards, which led him to propose naming it Proteo-Saurus.<ref name="Rudwick26-30">{{Harvnb|Rudwick|2008|pp=26–30}}</ref><ref name="Home1819">{{Harvnb|Home|1819}}</ref> By then Charles Konig, an assistant curator of the British Museum, had already suggested the name ''Ichthyosaurus'' (fish lizard) for the specimen and that name stuck. Konig purchased the skeleton for the museum in 1819.<ref name="Rudwick26-30" /> The skull of the specimen is still in the possession of the [[Natural History Museum, London|Natural History Museum]] in London (to which the fossil collections of the British Museum were transferred later in the century), but at some point, it became separated from the rest of the skeleton, the location of which is not known.<ref>{{Harvnb|Cadbury|2000|p=324}}</ref>

Anning found several other ichthyosaur fossils between 1815 and 1819, including almost complete skeletons of varying sizes. In 1821, [[William Conybeare (geologist)|William Conybeare]] and Henry De la Beche, both members of the Geological Society of London, collaborated on a paper that analysed in detail the specimens found by Anning and others. They concluded that ichthyosaurs were a previously unknown type of marine reptile, and based on differences in tooth structure, they concluded that there had been at least three species.<ref name="Rudwick26-30" /><ref name="Conybeare1821">{{Harvnb|De la Beche|Conybeare|1821}}</ref> Also in 1821, Anning found the {{convert|20|ft|m|abbr=on}} skeleton from which the species ''Ichthyosaurus platydon'' (now ''[[Temnodontosaurus platyodon]]'') would be named.<ref name=":2">{{Harvnb|Cadbury|2000|p=101}}</ref> In the 1980s it was determined that the first ichthyosaur specimen found by Joseph and Mary Anning was also a member of ''Temnodontosaurus platyodon''.<ref>{{Harvnb|McGowan|2001|p=210}}</ref>

In 2022, two plaster casts of the first complete ichthyosaur skeleton fossil found by Anning that was destroyed in the bombing of London during the Second World War, were discovered in separate collections. One is at the [[Peabody Museum of Natural History]] at [[Yale University]] in the US and the other at the [[Natural History Museum, Berlin|Natural History Museum]] in Berlin, Germany. The casts may be secondary, being made from a direct cast of the fossil, but are determined to be of good condition, "historically important", and likely taken from the specimen put for sale at auction by Anning in 1820.<ref>France-Presse, Agence, ''[https://www.sciencealert.com/a-historic-fish-lizard-fossil-bombed-by-nazis-had-copies-secretly-made A Historic 'Fish Lizard' Fossil Bombed by Nazis Had Copies Secretly Made]'', ''[[ScienceAlert]]'', ''[[Nature (magazine)|Nature]]'', 3 November 2022, with images</ref>