Zofia Kielan-Jaworowska Revealed the Paleobiolgy of Paleozoic Invertebrates, Mongolian Dinosaurs and the Earliest History of Mammals

Zofia Keilen-Jaworowska, linocut print, 11" x 14" by Ele Willoughby, 2025

Zofia Keilan-Jaworowksa (née Keilan, 1925-2015) was a Polish paleobiologist, famous for a series of Polish-Mongolian expeditions she lead in between 1963 and 1971 to the Gobi desert, where she discovered dinosaurs including the Deinocheirus, and Gallimimus and where she and her colleagues found the “Fighting Dinosaurs” fossil specimen in 1971 preserving a Protoceratops andrewsi and Velociraptor mongoliensis trapped in combat about 74 million years ago. Her research covered a wide range of palaeontology but her special interest was the origin and evolution of early mammals. She was the first woman to serve on the executive of the International Union of Geological Sciences and was a trailblazer in palaeontology.

Born in Sokołów Podlaski, Poland in 1925, her family, father Franciszek, mother Maria and she and older sister Krystyna ended up in a living borough of Warsaw. In 1939, when she was 14, Nazi Germany invaded Poland and triggered WWII. Germany would occupy Poland until the end of the war in Europe in 1945 and non-Germans were barred from higher education, on pain of death. The Polish resistance organized a clandestine network of instruction, risking their lives to continue teaching Polish students. In 1942 one of her school friends Jana Prot confessed that her family was loosing their apartment and she would have to leave the secret school; Zofia and Krystyna told Jana she should come live with them as they had room in their home. Their parents were fond of Jana and agreed, treated her as a third daughter. A visiting relative let the family know that Jana's father Jan Prot, formerly Berlinerbau,  a well-known chemist, and mother had converted to Catholicism from Judaism and thus housing Jana would dangerous. In Poland, the Nazis imposed the death penalty for helping Jews. Her parents told Zofia that they were so nervous they could not sleep, but opted to protect Jana. Her family found her a place she could stay and work on a farm, but when someone threatened to denounce her, the family took Jana back in, until the three girls completed high school in 1943. Jana moved out but the family often helped her. The family also hid Romana Laks, a 7 year old Jewish girl until she could get false papers which allowed her to hide in a convent. After high school Zofia secretly studied zoology at the University of Warsaw and joined the resistance "Grey Ranks," an underground paramilitary group organized from scouting groups, who trained her to be a medic. Zofia put her medic skills to work, with Jana who became a nursing student, caring for and transporting the wounded during the Warsaw Uprising, the 1944 failed attempt to oust the Germans. She found both shelter and the opportunity for volunteer work in the Zoological Museum which fostered her love for evolution and vertebrate palaeontology. In the wake of the subsequent retaliatory destruction of much of the city by Nazi forces, including the Department of Geology, when the university reopened to Polish students in 1945, she attended lectures offered by renown Polish palaeontologist Roman Kozłowski in his own home, which captured her imagination. 

She completed a masters in zoology and a doctorate in 1953 in paleontology at Warsaw University. Poland is rich in marine invertebrate fossils and her earliest research focused on trilobites, sea worms and Paleozoic (541-242 million years ago) marine fossils. Her innovative methods let her prepare the complex and delicate jaws of sea worm fossils. While at in 1950 graduate school she met her future husband, radiobiologist Zbigniew Jaworowska during a mounting climbing trip.  They married in 1958 and had a son, Mariusz in 1959. After graduate school she followed Kozłowski to work at the Institute of Paleobiology run by the Polish Academy of Science. Zbigniew was a big part of her life and well-known to her colleagues; their research interests intersected when she brought some fossils home, where he had a Geiger counter and noticed they were radioactive.

Now living behind the Iron Curtain during the Cold War, Keilan-Jaworowska realized that she had an opportunity to explore Mongolia, a Soviet satellite state, and that this was somewhere Western scientists could no longer travel. In the 1920s American Museum of Natural History expeditions had found dinosaurs which were new to science like Velociraptor and Protoceratops. When Kozłowski retired in 1961, Keilan-Jaworowska succeed him as Directory of the Institute of Paleobiology. As the Polish Academy of Science had just signed a cooperative agreement with Mongolia, at Kozłowski's suggestion she wrote a proposal for a series of joint Polish-Mongolian palaeontology expeditions to the Gobi Desert to study Late Cretaceous (80-75 million years ago) fossils. The Polish and Mongolian Academies of Science approved her proposal and she was selected as lead scientist and organizer, the first woman to lead a dinosaur excavation expedition. She lead seven of the total of eight such expeditions. Mounting expeditions to the remote Gobi, with its rash climate, and with limited financial and technological resources available in Cold War Poland was a tremendous challenge, but these expeditions were incredibly successful.

Wandering alone in a gully after rain, unusual for the desert, she wrote "found an unusual skeleton consisting of complete forelimbs and a shoulder girdle of enormous size, along with fragmentary ribs." The strange three-fingered limbs were 2.5 metres long! So, they named the dinosaur Deinocheirus, or terrible hand. Along with this discovery, they found many Tarbosaurus in the tyrannosaur family, the "thick-headed lizard" pachycephalosaurs like Homalocephale, ankylosaurs, sauropods like Nemegtosaurus, horned Cerotopsia, and ostrich-shaped ornithomimids like Gallimimus. During one single expedition in 1965, her team shipped 20 tonnes of fossils back to Poland. During the 1971 expedition, team member Andrzej Sulimski spotted a velociraptor; when the team excavated, they found it was entwined with a second fossil: a protoceratops! Now regarded a national treasure of Mongolia and housed at a museum in Ulanbaatar, this famous find is known as the "Fighting Dinosaurs" and included in my portrait. She also discovered fossils of types of crocodile, lizard, turtle and birds. Nothing could distract her from this work. Once she suffered a ruptured eardrum in the field during a sandstorm; she flew to Warsaw for surgery and then returned immediately to the field.

Despite the Cold War, Keilan-Jaworowska fostered camaraderie and built networks with leading Western scientists and around the world, disseminating the results of their expeditions as she spent the next quarter century interpreting the results of the expeditions with their unprecedented numbers of a wide variety of very complete fossils.

While making all these exciting dinosaur finds, Keilan-Jaworowska made her largest contributions in study of the early mammals of the Late Cretaceous. Previously, scientists had some fossil jaws and teeth but now much of what we know about the very origins and evolution of mammals can be traced back to her trailblazing research. She found many complete skulls and skeletons of most of the known groups of Late Cretaceous mammals. The final Polish-Mongolian expedition recovered 180 Mesozoic mammal skulls, the largest such collection worldwide, at the time. She changed the ways these animals were conceived. They had been thought rare and undiverse. She also changed our understanding of species, upending decades of thinking by showing that Deltatheridium, for instance, was closer to marsupials than placental mammals. She became an expert in Multituberculates, the early rodent-like forms like the Catopsbaatar in my portrait. She is especially for using laborious serial sections through the minute skulls. She showed these Multituberculates were viviparous, that is they bore live young, she studied their brains and estimated their intelligence and even showed some were venomous. She also made significant contributions to our understanding of the Eutheria clade, whose descendants include living placental mammals.

She really launched a new age of paleontological discovery. She published 230 scientific papers and books. Her first Nature paper in 1969 was very cited; she published 8 papers in Nature in total. Her 1970 book Hunting for Dinosaurs, translated from Polish to English was a scientific best seller. She described yurt hotels, challenges of communicating without being able to speak Mongolian, the lack of water and logistics challenges of providing for a team of 30, vehicle troubles and talented Mongolian drivers, sandstorms which descended like eclipses, darkening the sky, biting insects, venomous snakes and spiders, and rewarding if exhausting working in the heat. She was a visiting professor at Harvard from 1973 to 1974. By 1980, her membership in the Solidarity trade union made it complicated to remain in Poland. She stepped down as Director of the Institute of Paleobiology in 1982 and was a Visiting Professor at the National Museum of Natural History of Paris for two years.  At 68 she was a consultant on Jurassic Park for Stephen Spielberg. At 70 she took the role of Head of the Department of Palaeontology at the University of Oslo for 8 years. Dedicated to public outreach, she modernized the exhibits there, using what she had learned from setting up the large exhibits of the Gobi fossils. She returned to Poland in 1995, where she was appointed Professor Emerita at the Institute of Paleobiology. She kept working and publishing, long after retirement. She received the Romer-Simpson Medal, the highest honour of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology in 1996, for "sustained and outstanding excellence in scientific research and contributions to vertebrate palaeontology." In 1999, she received the Righteous Among Nations award for her aid to Jews during WWII. Both Jana and Romana survived the war. Zofia and Jana maintained their friendship and Jana was close with her family. Her parents corresponded with the Laks family and visited when in New York in 1976. Zofia published the key reference text Mammals From the Age of Dinosaurs (with Leo and Cifelli) in 2004 at 79. She served as editor of Acta Palaeontologica Polonica where open access was her watchword and where she helped authors from the developing world. Her obituary in Nature reads "Her style was, at times, unapologetically exacting - an apprenticeship with her was akin to martial-arts training with a Buddhist monk - but she pushed the rest of us to reach for better science." Her co-author Zhe-He Leo wrote, "She is the rarest among the rare - she has been a leader in making important scientific contributions, and also a gregarious and charismatic figure, both of which have made palaeontology a better science, and palaeontologists worldwide a better community." Several fossils have been named in her honour including Keilanodon, Keilantherium, Zofiabataar, Zofiagale and Indobaatar zofiae.

References 

Cifelli, Richard L., Zofia Keilan-Jaworowska (1925-2015), Nature, 520, 158 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/520158a
Cifelli, Richard L., Jørn Hurum, Magdelena Borsuk-Białynicka, Zhe-He Luo, and Andrzej Kaim, In Memorium: Zofia Keilan-Jaworowska, Acta Palaeontol. Pol. 60 (2): 287–290, 2015
Crumpton, Nick. Zofia Keilan-Jaworowska. Trowelblazers. August 27, 2014.
Delset, Lene Liebe. Legends of Rock: Zofia Keilan-Jaworowska. The Paleontological Society. Newsletter No. 97. March, 2018.
Fighting Dinosaurs, Wikipedia, accessed January, 2025
Mancini, Mark, She's the Most Famous Paleobiologist You May Not Know, How Stuff Works blog, accessed January, 2025.
Rytlowa, Jadwiga. The Keilan Family. Stories of Rescue, POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, November 2016.
Scott, Michon. Zofia Keilan-Jaworowska, StrangeScience.Net blog, December 21, 2024.
The Legend of the Gobi Desert: Professor Zofia Keilan-Jaworowska, Research in Poland, 20 December 2024.
Zofia Keilan-Jaworowska, Wikipedia, accessed January, 2025

Trilobites, ubiquitous Paleozoic arthropods as collaged linocut prints

 

Trilobite: Cheirurus ingricus prints Ele Willoughby, 2020

Trilobite: Cheirurus ingricus prints Ele Willoughby, 2020

My latest Paleozoic print once again takes advantage of a segmented fossil body to add colour and pattern with collaged Japanese washi papers. This member of the ubiquitous and wildly successful trilobites, prehistoric creatures which lived for hundreds of millions of years, was a Cheirurus ingricus which lived during the Late Cambrian through the Early Devonian era.

Cheirurus lived from about 500 million years ago to 390 million years ago. Trilobites were arthropods (as are modern day insects, lobsters, shrimp and more) which left fossils of their exoskeletons worldwide. There are many thousands of different species and their fossils have been important  to biostratigraphy, paleontology, evolutionary biology, and plate tectonics. It was hard to choose which one to portray as there are tens of thousands of different species of these critters, but I thought they were well suited to collaged segments.

Alice Wilson, tenacious geologist and paleontologist who persisted

Alice Wilson, linocut on collaged washi papers, 11" x 14" by Ele Willoughby, 2018

Some people are late bloomers. Some are slowed in their progress due to illness and battle serious illness throughout their life. Some scientists only pursue science a little later in life. Some experience all three. Alice Wilson did not at first study geology, and once a geologist her employer hindered her advance, as a woman, at every stage. Nevertheless, she persisted and made her greatest achievements later and took the greatest pleasure in her career after her retirement! Her extraordinary tenacity and glorious success late in life is such a satisfying story.

Geologist and paleontologist Alice Wilson (1881-1964) was outdoorsy as a girl. Her family spent its summers canoeing, camping and collecting fossils in the limestone formations near their home in Coburg, Ontario. The Wilsons valued scholarship and science. Her father was a professor of classics at the University of Toronto. She went to the University of Toronto to study modern languages and history, as preparation for one of the few career options for women: teaching. But her ill health prevented her from finishing her degree and she withdrew in her final year. When she recovered, she decided to pursue her fossil collecting first love, got a job in the Mineralogy Division of the University of Toronto Museum, and found an entry into her career in geology.

Then in 1909 she got a job as a museum assistant with the Geological Survey of Canada (GSC), in Ottawa, where she would work until 1946 and then maintain an office as an emeritus scientist until shortly before her death in 1964.  She was supervised by the GSC's chief paleontologist Percy Raymond and catalogued and labelled the invertebrate paleontology collections. Raymond encouraged her to complete her undergraduate degree, which she succeeded in doing in 1911, after which she was offered a permanent position with the survey - the first woman to hold a professional position there. Alice Wilson became the first female geologist in Canada, facing a series of roadblocks due to her sex. She had to fight for the right to do fieldwork, arguing to superiors that "with reference to further field work of the more strenuous type, I would like to point out that while not heavily built, I am muscularly very strong, and from earliest childhood have been accustomed to an out-of-door life both with canoe and tramping." Since she was forbidden to stay in remote field sites with male colleagues, she made a case that she could work alone during day trips which she made on foot or bicycle. Denied access to a government field vehicle provided to men she later used her own car. The GSC otherwise barred women from fieldwork until 1970. 

Her research interests focused on fossil invertebrates from the Paleozoic era (252–541 million years ago) from across Canada, and from the Ordovician era (444–485 million years ago) in her own backyard in Ontario and Quebec as well as Ordovician fauna from the Rockies and Arctic. She studied stratigraphy in Ontario and Quebec. Over the course of 50 years, she became an authority on fossils and rocks of the Ottawa - St. Lawrence Valley, as a direct response to the sexist limitations placed upon her. Her studies of the geology and paleontology around Cornwall, Ontario were vital to the construction of the St. Lawrence Seaway. She covered more than 16,000 square kilometers despite ill health, frail constitution and the limitations placed upon her.

Alice Wilson at Rigaud Mountain, Québec, May 1953, happy after retirement

(courtesy Natural Resources Canada/Photo number 165185-A)

She fought from 1915 for a decade for the right to take an education leave; paid leave was commonly awarded to her male peers. She despite repeated denials, she persisted and in 1926 she was allowed to apply for a scholarship from the Canadian Federation of University Women (CFUW), but when it was granted to her, she was again denied leave. CFUW campaigned on her behalf, even petitioning Cabinet members and eventually the GSC relented and allowed her leave. She earned her doctorate from the University of Chicago in 1929 at age 49! She returned to the GSC and was repeatedly denied promotions or the professional recognition she deserved. She had only been promoted from clerk to assistant paleontologist in 1919, and then to assistant geologist in 1926. She did not receive a raise, as was common practice, after completing her doctorate. Perhaps an unexpected champion, the government of Prime Minister R. B. Bennett was seeking a female federal civil servant to honour in 1935 and selected Wilson to become a Member of the Order of the British Empire. One suspects the GSC was shamed into action as they rapidly published her research for the first time in 10 years and gave her a promotion. Wilson became first the female Canadian Fellow of the Geological Society of America in 1936, and first female Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1938. She finally was promoted from assistant to a full geologist position in 1940. By 1945, she finally was addressed by the well-earned title "Dr." Five people were hired to replace her upon her retirement! Following compulsory retirement at age 65, in 1946, she had what she thought of as the happiest stage of her career. She was afforded the opportunity to mentor protegés and share her love of geology with students and children. She taught paleontology at Carleton, wrote a children’s book about geology The earth beneath our feet. She maintained an office as emeritus scientist at the GSC until she was 82, visiting daily and continuing her fieldwork. She published more than 50 academic papers throughout her career. When she finally gave up her office, the survey's director James M. Harrison tried to disuade her but she told him that her "work was done." Alice Wilson is one of only 60 inductees in the Canadian Science and Engineering Hall of Fame. Alice Wilson is now a designated national historic person.

I’ve shown her with one of her geological maps of the Ottawa region, published at the official "end" of her career just before she retired, which was for her another beginning. Her publication in 1946, 'Geology of the Ottawa - St. Lawrence Lowland, Ontario and Quebec' was the first the first major geological publication about the region and we owe our knowledge of the area's geology and economic resources including building stone, sand, gravel, and drinking water to Wilson.

References

Alice Wilson, Libraries and Archives Canada, accessed May 2, 2018
Alice Wilson, The Canadian Encyclopedia, accessed May 2, 2018
Wilson, A E, Geology of the Ottawa - St. Lawrence Lowland, Ontario and Quebec, Geological Survey of Canada, Memoir 241, 1946, 66 pages (4 sheets)
Alice Evelyn Wilson 1881-1964; Canadian Science and Engineering Hall of Fame, Canada Science and Technology Museum. 
The History of the Geological Survey of Canada in 175 Objects
Trailblazer - Alice Evelyn Wilson, 1881-1964 First Woman Geologist Left her Mark in Stone 
Alice Wilson, Wikipedia, accessed May 2, 2018
Parks Canada This Week in History for Monday December 24, 2012, Nothing could stop Alice Wilson!

Mary Anning, Great Fossil Hunter & Paleontology Pioneer for Ada Lovelace Day

Today is the fifth annual international day of blogging to celebrate the achievements of women in technology, science and math, Ada Lovelace Day 2013 (ALD13). I'm sure you'll all recall, Ada, brilliant proto-software engineer, daughter of absentee father, the mad, bad, and dangerous to know, Lord Byron, she was able to describe and conceptualize software for Charles Babbage's computing engine, before the concepts of software, hardware, or even Babbage's own machine existed! She foresaw that computers would be useful for more than mere number-crunching. For this she is rightly recognized as visionary - at least by those of us who know who she was. She figured out how to compute Bernouilli numbers with a Babbage analytical engine. Tragically, she died at only 36. Today, in Ada's name, people around the world are blogging 

I've been thinking for a while about whom I would like to portray, in a new print, and write about for Ada Lovelace Day. Emmy Noether has been on my 'to do' list for a while.  When I was taught Noether's Theorem, which related symmetries to conservation laws, I was absolutely flabbergasted. It's one of the most profound ideas in physics (and hence a pretty fundamental aspect of the universe as we know it). It's downright astounding that she isn't a household name (and remember, we do know the names of many male theoreticians even if an understanding of their work is uncommon). I experienced one of those - perhaps transcendental - flashes of insight where I suddenly 'saw' how the theorem was true. I think those moments actual explain why many people choose to be scientists; there's nothing like it. I don't know that I can explain it fully and I'm not sure I can explain the beauty of Noether's Theorem without spontaneously trying to teach anyone willing to listen a term of classical mechanics. I definitely do not know how to convey its meaning in a portrait... though as you can see from my portrait of Lady Ada Lovelace that I am willing to carve actual equations (in reverse, no less!) to show what a person accomplished, but the fact is that even if you do not understand the computation of Bernouilli numbers the meaning of the print is conveyed; Ada showed how the calculations could be done mechanically, on Charles Babbage's wondrous computing engine. To really let anyone understand Noether's tremendous accomplishment, I would need to make Noether's Theorem transparent... though I'm sure most artists would not feel constrained by this requirement. As I've yet to figure out how to do so, I wanted to select someone's whose achievements were more accessible and obvious to understand.

Mary Anning (21 May 1799 – 9 March 1847) was the wrong class, the wrong sex and even the wrong religious denomination to gain the education, opportunity to work and communicate her results or to garner any respect as a pioneering paleontologist. Further, during her lifetime most people in Britain and elsewhere thought the Earth was a mere few thousand years old, based on a very literal interpretation of the Bible and found the idea of extinction did not fit in with the story of creation. Yet, her fossil discoveries, meticulous collection, documentation and independent work to fully understand the anatomy of the amazing Jurassic creatures she encountered in famed Blue Lias cliffs of Lyme Regis, Dorset, England, were so undeniable that she gained the recognition, admiration and respect of the paleontologists of the day. Others working in the field at the time were almost uniformly male, upper class and Anglican - most of them in fact were clergymen; while Dissenters like Anning were banned from university, the army and several professions. It's hard to fathom today the way that the contributions of working class people could be blatantly ignored or appropriated by their so-called 'betters'. During her lifetime she was barred from even attending meetings of the Geological Society of London (let alone applying for membership) because of her sex and many wealthy "paleontologists" published claims of discovery based on having purchased fossils from Anning and other working class fossil hunters (neglecting to mention Anning's name or contribution). Nonetheless, many contemporary geologists and paleontologists became so impressed with her knowledge that they would visit her to consult on the anatomy and classification of fossil finds as well as collaborate on what we would today call field studies, including her friend Henry De la Beche, William Buckland (who acknowledged her role in recognizing the significance of coprolite to the Geological Society), Richard Owen,  Thomas Hawkins (whom she chastised for 'enhancing' his fossil skeletons by mixing finds before this unscientific habit resulted in scandal), Roderick Murchison, the famed Swiss palaeontologist Louis Agassiz (who thanked her in his book Studies of Fossil Fish, and named two species in her honour). She corresponded with the foremost geologists of her day, Charles Lyell, and Adam Sedgwick who taught Darwin. 

Her family was poor and her parents struggled with adequately support their 10 children (only two of whom survived infancy and childhood). Mary's formal education only included reading and writing which she was taught by the local Congregationalist school. Her father was a cabinet maker (who tragically died young) who like other locals supplemented his income by selling 'curios' to tourists, which were mainly ammonite fossils called 'snake stones' at the time. I've shown two of these spiral, fossil shells of these extinct cephalopods in my print. Mary made her living by selling fossils from a small roadside stand and ultimately a small store she set up in her home. She made her first significant find, the first ichthyosaur skeleton to be correctly identified, with her brother Joseph when she was only 12 years old. I've shown Mary Anning standing in front of the Blue Lias cliffs in front of an ichthyosaur skeleton, like the one she painstakingly excavated. She discovered and excavated the the first two plesiosaur skeletons ever found and the first pterosaur skeleton located outside Germany as well as many important fossil fish. I've also taken the artistic license to show a plesiosaurus fossil above her, based on one she herself found. The cliffs I've illustrated are so packed with fossils, not to underplay the work of finding these fossils, but to try and illustrate the some of the huge scope of her finds. She also worked on invertebrates. Her research showed that belemnite fossils contained fossilised ink sacs like those of modern cephalopods. She was also the first to recognize that coprolites, known as bezoar stones at the time, were fossilised... well, animal droppings (feces). While this sounds distinctly unglamorous, the study of coprolites pioneered by Anning and Buckland were vital to understanding ancient ecosystems. Her friend Henry De la Beche painted the first widely circulated representation of a prehistoric (deep time) scene, based on her finds, and he sold prints to benefit her financially.

Despite her limited formal education she read the scientific literature of the day, copying technical anatomical diagrams and made her own dissections of animals to make comparative studies with her fossil finds. Despite the many barriers to her, she did succeed in having her 1839 letter to the editor Magazine of Natural History published, which corrected an erroneous claim about the classification of extinct sharks.

Gathering fossils along the cliffs, especially following storms when new fossils could be found due to the recent erosion and during the winter months was dangerous work. The tides could come in quickly and the cliffs were not always stable. She narrowly escaped being crushed in a landslide which claimed the life of her faithful dog Tray.

Though she resented the way her own work was ignored or appropriated by others, she did become increasingly well-known, as her life advanced and posthumously. She struggled financially for most of her life, and she did receive help from colleagues who held her in high esteem. Nine years before her death she was given an annuity, raised by members of the British Association for the Advancement of Science and the Geological Society of London.  After she was diagnosed with cancer, in 1846 the Geological Society raised money from its members to help with her expenses and the council of the newly created Dorset County Museum made her an honorary member. When she died, Henry De la Beche wrote and read her eulogy at a Geological Society meeting beginning,

"I cannot close this notice of our losses by death without advertising to that of one, who though not placed among even the easier classes of society, but one who had to earn her daily bread by her labour, yet contributed by her talents and untiring researches in no small degree to our knowledge of the great Enalio-Saurians, and other forms of organic life entombed in the vicinity of Lyme Regis ..."

Members of the Society commissioned stained glass windows in her parish church in her memory. Charles Dickens wrote of her in 1865 that "[t]he carpenter's daughter has won a name for herself, and has deserved to win it." 


She has since been recognized for her scientific contributions by the Royal Society, paleontologists, geologists, historians of science and even in some popular culture. It is often repeated that she is the subject of the well-known tongue-twister

She sells seashells on the seashore
The shells she sells are seashells, I'm sure
So if she sells seashells on the seashore
Then I'm sure she sells seashore shells.

but there is no solid evidence to support this; in fact, this is likely metafolklore, a folktale about a tongue twister. She appears in in The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969) by John Fowles, and she is the subject of the historical novels Remarkable Creatures (2009) by Tracy Chevalier and Curiosity (2010) by Joan Thomas.

This post contains much information from the remarkably thorough wikipedia entry on Mary Anning, the Natural History Museaum biography of Mary Anning (which calls her "the greatest fossil hunter ever known") and though it was a novel and takes some license with personal relationships for the sake of an engaging story, the very enjoyable 'Curiosity' (2010) by Joan Thomas (which I reviewed here). Edited August 26, 2023 to correct myth about tongue twister.

Banners

I spent my free time making new banners and doing blog and shop make-overs (including making-over the Toronto Etsy Street Team blog with its new look thanks to thunderpeep). What do you think?

This is for the minouette Etsy shop.
Before



After


And, for the minouette blog, where there was initially the same banner as the shop...

After


The original banner meant something to me and did say something about what my shop was about. It shows a manipulated photo of the Toronto skyline (so, where I am) with an image of a sea creature which I captured when using a ROV during fieldwork in the north Pacific (which hints at some of my interests). The image is scientific, yet surreal, and the colours and typeface are supposed to suggest art and specifically printmaking. However, it's been there since 2007, it's a photo rather than a handmade print, and I thought I could make something which was a better representation of me and my art.

The shop banner shows two of my linocut dinosaurs (an euoplocephalus and a torosaurus, respectively), so it shows the sort of natural history (and specifically paleontology) which appears in my work, along with the idiosyncratic lettering, stars and the thought-bubble with a heart to show the quirky side of what I create.

The blog banner is made of the monograms I've been printing, so we get a little typography and natural history (complete with dinosaurs) and a few mythical creatures thrown in for good measure. This strikes me a a pretty good synopsis of my subjects of late.