--- title: Google Doodle Honors Mary Anning, Early Woman Paleontologist description: Anning was famous for discovering early dinosaur fossils at time when few women were scientists canonical: https://time.com/107287/mary-anning-google-doodle/ author: Sam Frizell article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2014-05-21T12:14:53.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-08-04T07:38:14.012Z og:title: Google's homepage doodle honors paleontologist Mary Anning og:description: Anning was famous for discovering early dinosaur fossils at time when few women were scientists og:url: https://time.com/107287/mary-anning-google-doodle/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltde093bcdab65f2d0/6988d9b9bc6cfc69913e2a3c/time-logo.jpg?branch=production og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 675 og:image:alt: TIME og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Google's homepage doodle honors paleontologist Mary Anning twitter:description: Anning was famous for discovering early dinosaur fossils at time when few women were scientists twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltde093bcdab65f2d0/6988d9b9bc6cfc69913e2a3c/time-logo.jpg?branch=production --- # Google Doodle Honors Mary Anning, Female Paleontologist > Sponsored content. 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It curates the day's top headlines with TIME's reporting and analysis across politics, world affairs, business, health and culture. It is free to join at time.com/newsletters. #### How do I sign up for The Brief? The Brief is available free at time.com/newsletters, where readers can select it along with any of TIME's other six newsletters. There is no subscription required to receive it. #### Is The Brief free? Yes. The Brief is a free daily email newsletter from TIME. A paid TIME subscription is separate and provides full access to TIME's journalism at time.com/subscribe-agent. #### Who writes The Brief? The Brief is led by editor Richard Hall and draws on reporting from TIME's newsroom. Every edition is assembled by TIME editors rather than generated automatically. ## Video: How Google Makes its Doodles [Watch (HLS stream): How Google Makes its Doodles](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/upF0qp1E.m3u8) (3:23)  _Published 2018-07-07. Our videographer went to the Googleplex in Mountain View, California to meet some of the designers and coders who create the special, clever variations on the Google.com logo known as_ by [Sam Frizell](https://time.com/author/sam-frizell/) ## Sam Frizell May 21, 2014 12:14 PM UTC by [Sam Frizell](https://time.com/author/sam-frizell/) ## Sam Frizell May 21, 2014 12:14 PM UTC Google’s homepage doodle today features paleontologist Mary Anning, on the 215th anniversary of the famous British fossil finder’s birth. Anning was born on May 21, 1799 and became known around the world for key findings she made in the Jurassic marine fossil beds at [Lyme Regis in Dorset](http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/history/anning.html), southern England, an area particularly rich in fossils. She discovered the first ichthyosaur skeleton at the age of 12, as well as the first two plesiosaur skeletons ever found. As a woman with a working class background, Anning did not always receive full credit for her work, but she was awarded a stipend by the [Geological Society of London](https://www.sdsc.edu/ScienceWomen/anning.html) and named Honorary Member of the new Dorset County Museum one year before her death of breast cancer at age 47\. ## Transcript >> The Doodle team was able to meet Ira Glass from This American Life, and he was just meeting us for fun. I guess, I'm not even sure why he was here, but we talked about potentially collaborating and they thought that it'd be fun to collaborate with us on Valentine's Day, so I took the lead on this project. >> We do Valentine's Day pretty much every year, and we've done your typical like lovebirds and, you know, flowers and things like that. But Ira and his team are awesome. >> They were able to pull stories that they have collected over the years, they've recorded new stories for us, and they're all about love in all different respects of the word. They sent us maybe 8 or 10 stories and they're all really fun and really sweet. >> The stories run the [ unk ]. There is a story about middle school love. >> I was in the cafeteria, just got on a drink of root beer and she walks up to me. >> There is a story about a new bride who's in doubt that she made a mistake. >> My husband, me and I, we're just so worried, his face I could tell. I said, " Where he could be ," you know, and I-- and I called the police because I thought he got lost or something happened. >> When I first got the audio from Ira, my co- worker and I listened to it together and we wrote down bullet points of where we wanted to have a little drawing come up. >> One of my favorite stories, it involves middle schoolers. We're titling it, " Puppy Love" so true to the title, I just-- I just drew everyone as a dog. >> Each stories are-- containing a little candy heart. >> And when you click on it, the heart will flip, the audio will play and you will also see the images that we've drawn to accompany the phrases. So, now we are all going to brainstorms together because we need the creative side and we also need the technical side to tell us what is possible and what isn't possible. For this one, it's a pretty conservative on the interactive side, because we didn't want to overshadow the audio. When I first started, they were no engineers on the team, we only did static doodles, but since then, we've started doing more animated stuff, more interactive work, and for that we needed a dedicated team. >> Some of our most like ambitious to those have come from engineers that are just incredibly talented and spare similar time for our projects. >> Sometimes the illustrators will come up with an idea that is way too wacky and just not possible yet. The technology hasn't been invented, but sometimes we're too conservative and it's great to have the engineers there to tell us that we can actually be way wackier with our ideas. The relationship with my engineer on this was to just keep my files size at a reasonable capacity, I was getting a little bit ambitious with how many frames I wanted to draw and my engineers said, " Hey, you need to double it ." >> We tried to do as many doodles as we possibly can. We're a pretty small team, relative to how many audiences are out there [ unk ], but yeah, we-- you never know what you're gonna get. 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