Good afternoon or morning,

I’ve just today started a book on the UK’s coastline, and have already found out about two women that I didn’t really know about before. Here they are! Of course, both sea themed.

Emma Turner lived a reclusive life – for a while at least – on Scolt Head Island. The photographs make this place look beautiful, but from the descriptions in the book it sounds quite bleak and windswept, the author close to traumatised by childhood holidays there. No trauma for Emma Turner, who looked after the island and its nesting terns for seven months. She lived alone and in fact encouraged the boatman to drown the next load of people who came to gawp at “the loneliest woman in England”. Whether or not he did is unrecorded, but the terns bounced right back under her care.

Have a Radio 4 link about her, for your next tea break:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b019rlz0

Mary Anning! What dinosaurs didn’t she find.

Her discoveries included the first ichthyosaur skeleton correctly identified; the first two plesiosaur skeletons found; the first pterosaur skeleton located outside Germany; and important fish fossils. Her observations played a key role in the discovery that coprolites, known as bezoar stones at the time, were fossilised faeces. She also discovered that belemnite fossils contained fossilised ink sacs like those of modern cephalopods.

As with so many stories of the era, this is not the happiest; as working class outsider to the scientific community, she sold a lot of fossils to men who seemed to assume that this sale included the credit for finding it. Dickens, though, wrote a long article on her for his magazine, which is on google books here:

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=_ZHNAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA60&redir_esc=y&hl=en#v=onepage&q&f=false

Happy weekend,

Alex.