Mary Anning

The original version of the painting at left depicts Mary Anning (1799-1847), whose story is the reputed origin of the phrase "She sells seashells by the seashore". She was a carpenter’s daughter with little formal education who made major contributions to the budding field of paleontology. She discovered the first complete plesiosaurs, and the first pterosaur outside of Germany. She was well-known to other fossil hunters, but as a woman in an era when only male thought was recognized, was forbidden to join academic societies, and was unable to publish her work. She did not have a primitive Apple II, did not write computer code, and did not have a time machine, although she would have found one useful. H.G. Wells wrote the first version of the Time Machine story in 1886, 39 years after she died, but it’s a time machine, so that would have been ok.

by Daniel M. Dobkin
(with help from Amelia and Nicholas Dobkin)




Science tries to answer deep questions about the real world. Questions like

What was the most indecisive ancestral human species?
What rodents are made of fish eggs?
How do you refer to embedded code included in an email?
What's a wire's favorite comic strip?
What's the past tense of IC?
What is the wavelength of a sheep?
What can trap charged particles and hold up your pants?
What did the stone column say to the support beam?
What's a printer's favorite country music title?
Why does an amplifier oscillate when you try to sell it at Apple HQ in Cupertino?

do not qualify. But you can find them all, with answers of varying absurdity, in She Sells C Shells by the Seashore, along with hundreds of other mostly-science-based jokes, poems, and reflections. Now available as an e-book or paperback on Amazon.