15. PATIENCE – The Patience of Mary Anning
A more complete description of her find detailed the creature as having the head of a lizard, the teeth of a crocodile, the long neck of a serpent, the ribs of a chameleon, and the paddles of a whale. Further examination revealed that Mary had unearthed a complete nine-foot-long skeleton of a plesiosaurus, Greek for “near lizard,” that swam in the ancient oceans 200 million years ago. Mary spent the next few years patiently searching for more fossils. Five years later, again in the cold and stormy month of December, she discovered not a creature of the ancient sea but one of the air. With claws on its wings and long teeth in its mouth, this creature became known as a “flying dragon.” Today we know it as a dimorphodon , and we credit Mary as the first to discover it.
Exactly one year after finding the flying dragon, Mary discovered a never-before-seen, 1 ½ foot-long fossil fish called a squaloraja . Then twelve months later, December 1830, she found what she described as the most
beautiful fossil she had ever seen, with every bone in place as if it had been carved out of wax. This was a young, curled-up plesiosaurus .
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