Maret 02, 2017
who loves dinosaurs? i know you do, squeaks, and i do, too! dinosaurs were just one kind of awesome reptilethat lived on earth a long time ago. there were also reptiles that flew, calledpterosaurs, and all kinds of giant creatures of the sea, like plesiosaurs and ichthyosaurs! and we wouldn’t know nearly as much as wedo about these amazing animals today, if it weren’t for a person by the name of maryanning. mary anning was born in england over 250 yearsago. she never went to school, but she learnedhow to write and read.
and she spent a lot of her life reading books-- books about our favorite topic here at the fort — science! some of her favorite science books were aboutrocks. others were about animals — ones that shesaw in her own backyard, and ones that lived a long time ago. when mary was a young girl, her family livednear the ocean. so, when she wasn’t busy reading, she wouldtake walks along the cliffs near the sea and collect shells to sell to visitors. and she also was always on the hunt ... forfossils!
fossils are the left-over parts of plantsand animals that lived a long time ago. and when i say a long time ago...i mean along time ago! millions of years ago, the earth looked prettydifferent from how we know it today. if you look at a picture of what scientiststhink the earth looked like then, you can see that a lot of the world was covered withwater. and millions of years ago, the ocean was fullof lots of different kinds of plants and animals than you see today. when these things died, parts of them fellto the bottom of the ocean and were buried under sand and rock.
over a long time, these parts left behindfossils. fast forward to today! most of the animals and plants that were alivethen are now extinct, which means there aren’t any of them alive anymore. and the earth has changed since then, too! some of the parts of the world that used tobe under the ocean aren’t anymore... ...including where mary lived, in england! so when she took her walks along the beach,she was able to find lots of fossils left behind by things that lived in the ocean millionsof years ago.
and that’s why, when mary anning was onlytwelve years old, she discovered the fossil of a big, extinct animal that lived in theocean. she and her eleven year old brother foundthe entire skeleton of an extinct reptile called an ichthyosaur. do you think an ichthyosaur looks like anotheranimal? i agree, squeaks! like fish and dolphins, this animal had finsand flippers to help it swim in the ocean. don’t be fooled, though — the ichthyosaurwasn’t a fish, and it wasn’t a mammal, like dolphins are.
ichthyosaurs were reptiles, like snakes andlizards. now, the ichthyosaur wasn’t mary anning’sonly excellent discovery! she was also the first to discover a wholeskeleton of another extinct reptile—the plesiosaur. like the ichthyosaur, the plesiosaur livedin the ocean. and check it out! when people first saw the skeleton that anninghad found, some people didn’t believe it was real! because anning didn’t study science in school,many scientists at the time didn’t think
that her work should be taken seriously. but that didn’t stop her. she kept looking...and learning...and makingdrawings of the fossils that she found. all of these things helped get other peopleinterested and excited about her discoveries. and there’s one more mystery about ancientanimals that mary anning solved. while she was studying fossils of ichthyosaursand plesiosaurs, she found some small, strange stones among the animals’ bones. other scientists had found them, too, andthey didn’t know what they were, either. but anning was curious about them, and decidedto break them open to see what was inside.
and what she found inside was — even smallerbones of other kinds of animals, like fish and other sea creatures. she realized that the small stones were awhole new kind of fossil...fossilized poop! those weird little rocks contained the bitsof animals that those old ocean reptiles had eaten! mary anning’s work taught us a lot aboutwhat life was like millions of years ago -- even though that life often looked strange comparedto the living things we know today. she spent her life looking at the world aroundher...reading...asking questions...and learning everything she could about science.
hey, it sounds like she’d fit right in hereat the fort! thanks for joining me on scishow kids. if you have a question for us, ask a grownupto help you to leave us a comment on this video, or to send an email to kids@scishow.com!
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