Mary Anning spent her life on the beach at Lyme Regis in Dorset, digging fossils out of the crumbling cliffs and selling them, and some of what she dug out changed what people believed about the deep past: ichthyosaurs, the first nearly complete plesiosaur. The papers that described those animals to the learned societies often left her out. The first scientific account of an ichthyosaur she had excavated does not mention her at all, and later ones thanked the gentlemen who had bought the bones from her. A few writers did name her. Today most people meet her through she sells seashells on the seashore, and there is no evidence the tongue twister was ever about her. She was left off the pages that were about her, and written into the one line that wasn’t.