Before sitting down to watch “Ammonite,” the new film from writer/director Francis Lee, it might be helpful to know a little bit about the history of paleontology – specifically, about a woman named Mary Anning.
Anning grew up in a poor family in Lyme Regis, a town on the English Channel, where she helped with the family business of selling fossils from the region’s geologically rich beaches and cliffsides to the many tourists attracted by its seaside resorts.
At the age of 12, she found what would eventually become the first correctly identified full skeleton of a marine dinosaur known as an ichthyosaur; it was a breakthrough discovery that played a major role in reshaping the way scientists (and the rest of the world) understood