THE ULTIMATE
On this day, Mat 23rd 1707, Carl Linnaeus was born in Rashult, Sweden.
Linnaeus became a botanist and explorer, who develoed the principles for defining species and types of organisms in the plant and animal kingdoms, leading to a uniform system for the naming of plants and animals. He was born in a poor area of Sweden, and was unable to afford attending all the lectures at university, though he was eventually able to by teaching botany. As a young man he devloped his ideas and principles, that he was to set out in a number of works, whilst carrying out studies in Lapland amongst the Sami people, of Northern Scandinavia. He also gained his medical qualifications whilst in the Netherlands, where he began to gain the sponsors he needed in order to publish his ideas. Back in Sweden he practised medicine, but sought to return to the study of botany, and was able to build up a network of exploring botanists, who travelled the world at the time of European exploration, bringing to him more specimens to be placed in the growing tree of life his naming system was steadily mapping.
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On this day, May 21st 1799, Mary Anning the pioneering fossil hunter was born.
Lyme Regis is famous for its Fossils, and Mary Anning was the pioneering female fossil hunter - the 'Princess of Paleontology', 1799 - 1847. She discovered the first ichthyosaur (aged 12), first plesiosaur and first British pterosaur. Her range of scientific discoveries did not gain her the credit they deserved, in the male dominated scientific community at the time. She took on the family fossil business, selling samples to the King of Saxony, and for display at the forerunner to the New York Academy of Sciences, the Lyceum of Natural History. She is buried in St. Michael's church, where there is a window dedicated to her. In 2010 the Royal Society placed her in a list of the ten British women who had most influenced science. Find out more: Video from the Smithsonian, the US museum in Washington DC, featuring David Attenborough as he visits the Natural History Museum in London, where you can see some of Mary Anning's finds in London: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/videos/category/history/prolific-princess-of-paleontology-mary-anning/ Two Videos from the BBC on Mary Anning's life: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNOh-85_Dmc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BEbgTpdwRgI It's called the 'Crazy Beast' and for good reason, it was a reasonably large, well bigger than a mouse or rat sized mammal, that lived amongst the last of the dinosaurs!
At around the size of a cat, and would have burrowed like a badger - which was probably how it escaped the dinosaurs to survive, or at least escaped the carnivorous ones. The 66 million year old fossil, was discoverd in Madagascar, and from a time when Madagascar had already broken away as an island. As the fossil breaks a lot of the known rule about mammals at this time it hasbeen called the 'Crazy Beast'! See more on the BBC at... https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-52465584 |
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