Mary Anning wasn’t actually ever made a Royal Society fellow like the other scientists in this project, but in today’s world she surely would be, so I’m sneaking her in anyway.

We’ve all felt the delight in finding a fossil shell embedded in a bit of limestone and fantasized about coming across a T-rex in our back garden. Well Mary Anning never found a T-rex, but her garden wasn’t far from one of the truly fabulous fossil hotspots of the world, the cliffs at Lyme Regis. Her family collected and sold fossils to make a living and marine fossils in particular became her life’s work. She found Ichthyosaurs, Pleisiosaurs and Pterosaurs by scrambling along the cliffs after winter storms when new rock had fallen away. It was a bit of a race against time to grab these fossils before the sea could damage them.

You might think these large, glamorous finds would make her rich, or at least comfortably off. No chance. She often lived from hand to mouth and was rarely given much money or glory for her work. Scientists of the day knew she was more than a mere labourer. They regularly asked her advice on classification and interpretation.

One of my favourite aspects of her work is that she noticed ancient ink sacs that she found in squid fossils, and found the ink was still usable for artists. She was much much more than simply a fossil rescuer. In this wallpaper I have taken the basic arches of an Ichthyosaur rib cage as the main motif. I have some encased in another colour to mimic the casting work she did day to day to enable the fossils to be removed intact. The pools of colour are a hint to the fossilised ink she recognised and described. On a larger scale the wallpaper has subtle horizontal layers that mimic the sedimentary rock where these fossils formed.