Mary Anning

Today's Google Doodle (in the UK) celebrates the 215th birthday of Mary Anning who discovered the first complete plesiosaur skellington in the cliffs at Lyme Regis in Dorset.

I met her a couple of years ago while on a PlayAwayAwayDay with the Putney School of Art and Design Children's Book Illustration class at the Natural History Museum in London. We sat on a bench in the long corridor - where many of the "curies" she found are displayed on the wall - and spoke of many things, of ichthyosaurs and brassicas and monarchs.

She told me she'd "ben streck boy loytnin twoice!" Perhaps that's how she found herself in the Natural History Museum more than 200 years later. The lightening opened up a dimensional nexus in the timespace continuum and sucked her through. Or perhaps her doppelgänger was spirited there like in the film 'The Prestige" where Nikola Tesla's (David Bowie) lightening machine teleported duplicates of objects and people placed in its path.

More likely she was an actor acosting unwary visitors to elucidate them concerning the nature of the history and the history of the nature.

Here's a not quite finished waterclolour I did at the time. I think the project was to create a book jacket.