The daughter of a cabinet maker who sold ‘natural curiosities’ in Lyme Regis, on the Dorset coast in the south of England, Mary Anning learned from her father how to collect fossils from the Jurassic rocks exposed in the cliffs along the shore. After her father died in 1810, Mary began collecting fossils on her own behalf. In 1811 she saw bones protruding from the cliff and hired men to dig out the rock in which they were embedded. When the material was finally exposed it proved to be the skeleton of an animal 5 m long, and eventually identified as Ichthyosaurus platyodon (see ichthyosauria). Mary Anning later found fossils of cephalopods (see cephalopoda), Plesiosaurus (see plesiosauroidea), Dimorphodon (Pterosauria), and fish. Her discoveries attracted many distinguished palaeontologists to Lyme Regis and made her famous. She is commemorated by a stained glass window in the parish church and in the tongue-twister ‘She sells sea shells on the sea shore’.