#anning

Eggboy has done a service to Australian’s by egging the Queensland senator.

If you don’t know the senator turned around the recent massacre in New Zealand by making his “apology” into stopping the intake of refugees and or other Muslim people in general, basically deamonisong the victims here. Eggboy, a 17 year old legend. smashed an egg on this guys head and it was euphoric.

Edit) this isn’t meant to be supporting or condoning violence. If you don’t like that stuff please don’t look at the video 😊

Warning; depictions of assault and a clip from a terror attack is shown in the video below. If you don’t like violence do not watch

Mary Anning was born in 1799 in the town of Lyme Regis on the Dorset Coast to parents Richard and Molly Anning. Out of at least nine children born to the Annings, only Mary and her older brother Joseph survived past childhood. This is despite Mary herself being struck by lightning at only 15 months old as she was being carried by another woman. Three women were killed in the lightning strike but miraculously, Mary survived.

The Anning family were poor and working class- the bottom of the pile in society. On top off this, the family were dissenters, protestants who had separated from the Church of England, who were often ostracised by other Christians. She attended a school run by the Congregationalist dissenters, though the education she received here did not extend far past reading and writing.

[Image of a drawing finished in 1842 showing the fossil shop and home Mary purchased in Lyme Regis]

Mary and her brother would frequently join their father, a cabinet maker by trade, on fossil hunting expeditions along the coastline, which they would then sell for extra money. This was a dangerous occupation and in 1810, when Mary was just 10, their father died of a combination of injuries contracted from a cliff fall and being weakened by tuberculosis. The family was left with his debts to pay and had to rely on parish support to survive.

Mary was left to take over the fossil business to provide for her family while Joseph became an apprentice upholster. Even though she lacked formal education, Mary taught herself geology and anatomy and the rest is history (and will be covered more in a Mary: the Scientist post!).

She was highly successful and by 1826 had saved up enough money to buy her own home and store, Anning’s Fossil Depot.

Once again, the dangers of Mary’s trade were shown when she narrowly avoided being crushed in a landslide in 1833 while she was out fossiling and sadly, she lost her dog, Tray, that day. In a letter, she wrote: "Perhaps you will laugh when I say that the death of my old faithful dog has quite upset me, the cliff that fell upon him and killed him in a moment before my eyes, and close to my feet ... it was but a moment between me and the same fate”

In her personal life, it is well known that she was good friends with fellow fossil collector and palaeontologist Elizabeth Philpot. The two often worked together and it was Philpot who first discovered that the ink sacs Mary had discovered in belemnites could be revived and used for writing and drawing.

Another childhood friend of Mary’s, Henry de la Beche was so inspired by Mary’s finds that he painted the famous Duria Antiquior, which he then sold prints of to help in supporting Anning through her continuing financial difficulties.

[Oil on canvas reproduction of Duria Antiquior painted in 1850, based on de la Beche’s earlier 1830 watercolour]