title: Symbiosis

text: As the endosymbiont adapts to the host's lifestyle, the endosymbiont changes dramatically. There is a drastic reduction in its genome size, as many genes are lost during the process of metabolism, and DNA repair and recombination, while important genes participating in the DNA-to-RNA transcription, protein translation and DNA/RNA replication are retained. The decrease in genome size is due to loss of protein coding genes and not due to lessening of inter-genic regions or open reading frame (ORF) size. Species that are naturally evolving and contain reduced sizes of genes can be accounted for an increased number of noticeable differences between them, thereby leading to changes in their evolutionary rates. When endosymbiotic bacteria related with insects are passed on to the offspring strictly via vertical genetic transmission, intracellular bacteria go across many hurdles during the process, resulting in the decrease in effective population sizes, as compared to the free-living bacteria. The incapability of the endosymbiotic bacteria to reinstate their wild type phenotype via a recombination process is called "Muller's ratchet" phenomenon. Muller's ratchet phenomenon, together with less effective population sizes, leads to an accretion of deleterious mutations in the non-essential genes of the intracellular bacteria. This can be due to lack of selection mechanisms prevailing in the relatively "rich" host environment.


title: Symbiosis

text: Commensalism describes a relationship between two living organisms where one benefits and the other is not significantly harmed or helped. It is derived from the English word commensal, used of human social interaction. It derives from a medieval Latin word meaning sharing food, formed from "com-" (with) and "mensa" (table).


title: Symbiosis

text: Commensal relationships may involve one organism using another for transportation (phoresy) or for housing (inquilinism), or it may also involve one organism using something another created, after its death (metabiosis). Examples of metabiosis are hermit crabs using gastropod shells to protect their bodies, and spiders building their webs on plants.


title: Symbiosis

text: In a parasitic relationship, the parasite benefits while the host is harmed. Parasitism takes many forms, from endoparasites that live within the host's body to ectoparasites and parasitic castrators that live on its surface and micropredators like mosquitoes that visit intermittently. Parasitism is an extremely successful mode of life; about 40% of all animal species are parasites, and the average mammal species is host to 4 nematodes, 2 cestodes, and 2 trematodes.


title: Symbiosis

text: Mimicry is a form of symbiosis in which a species adopts distinct characteristics of another species to alter its relationship dynamic with the species being mimicked, to its own advantage. Among the many types of mimicry are Batesian and Müllerian, the first involving one-sided exploitation, the second providing mutual benefit. Batesian mimicry is an exploitative three-party interaction where one species, the mimic, has evolved to mimic another, the model, to deceive a third, the dupe. In terms of signalling theory, the mimic and model have evolved to send a signal; the dupe has evolved to receive it from the model. This is to the advantage of the mimic but to the detriment of both the model, whose protective signals are effectively weakened, and of the dupe, which is deprived of an edible prey. For example, a wasp is a strongly-defended model, which signals with its conspicuous black and yellow coloration that it is an unprofitable prey to predators such as birds which hunt by sight; many hoverflies are Batesian mimics of wasps, and any bird that avoids these hoverflies is a dupe. In contrast, Müllerian mimicry is mutually beneficial as all participants are both models and mimics. For example, different species of bumblebee mimic each other, with similar warning coloration in combinations of black, white, red, and yellow, and all of them benefit from the relationship.


title: Symbiosis

text: Amensalism is a non-symbiotic, asymmetric interaction where one species is harmed or killed by the other, and one is unaffected by the other. There are two types of amensalism, competition and antagonism (or antibiosis). Competition is where a larger or stronger organism deprives a smaller or weaker one of a resource. Antagonism occurs when one organism is damaged or killed by another through a chemical secretion. An example of competition is a sapling growing under the shadow of a mature tree. The mature tree can rob the sapling of necessary sunlight and, if the mature tree is very large, it can take up rainwater and deplete soil nutrients. Throughout the process, the mature tree is unaffected by the sapling. Indeed, if the sapling dies, the mature tree gains nutrients from the decaying sapling. An example of antagonism is "Juglans nigra" (black walnut), secreting juglone, a substance which destroys many herbaceous plants within its root zone.


title: Symbiosis

text: Amensalism is often used to describe strongly asymmetrical competitive interactions, such as between the Spanish ibex and weevils of the genus "Timarcha" which feed upon the same type of shrub. Whilst the presence of the weevil has almost no influence on food availability, the presence of ibex has an enormous detrimental effect on weevil numbers, as they consume significant quantities of plant matter and incidentally ingest the weevils upon it.


title: Symbiosis

text: Cleaning symbiosis is an association between individuals of two species, where one (the cleaner) removes and eats parasites and other materials from the surface of the other (the client). It is putatively mutually beneficial, but biologists have long debated whether it is mutual selfishness, or simply exploitative. Cleaning symbiosis is well known among marine fish, where some small species of cleaner fish, notably wrasses but also species in other genera, are specialised to feed almost exclusively by cleaning larger fish and other marine animals.


title: Symbiosis

text: Symbiosis is increasingly recognized as an important selective force behind evolution; many species have a long history of interdependent co-evolution.


title: Symbiosis

text: Although symbiosis was once discounted as an anecdotal evolutionary phenomenon, evidence is now overwhelming that obligate or facultative associations among microorganisms and between microorganisms and multicellular hosts had crucial consequences in many landmark events in evolution and in the generation of phenotypic diversity and complex phenotypes able to colonise new environments.


title: Symbiosis

text: Evolution originated from changes in development where variations within species are selected for or against because of the symbionts involved. The Hologenome theory relates to the holobiont and symbionts genome together as a whole. Microbes live everywhere in and on every multicellular organism. Many organisms rely on their symbionts in order to develop properly, this is known as co-development. In cases of co-development the symbionts send signals to their host which determine developmental processes. Co-development is commonly seen in both arthropods and vertebrates.


title: Symbiosis

text: One hypothesis for the origin of the nucleus in eukaryotes (plants, animals, fungi, and protists) is that it developed from a symbiogenesis between bacteria and archaea. It is hypothesized that the symbiosis originated when ancient archaea, similar to modern methanogenic archaea, invaded and lived within bacteria similar to modern myxobacteria, eventually forming the early nucleus. This theory is analogous to the accepted theory for the origin of eukaryotic mitochondria and chloroplasts, which are thought to have developed from a similar endosymbiotic relationship between proto-eukaryotes and aerobic bacteria. Evidence for this includes the fact that mitochondria and chloroplasts divide independently of the cell, and that these organelles have their own genome.


title: Symbiosis

text: The biologist Lynn Margulis, famous for her work on endosymbiosis, contended that symbiosis is a major driving force behind evolution. She considered Darwin's notion of evolution, driven by competition, to be incomplete and claimed that evolution is strongly based on co-operation, interaction, and mutual dependence among organisms. According to Margulis and her son Dorion Sagan, "Life did not take over the globe by combat, but by networking."


title: Symbiosis

text: About 80% of vascular plants worldwide form symbiotic relationships with fungi, in particular in arbuscular mycorrhizas.


title: Symbiosis

text: Flowering plants and the animals that pollinate them have co-evolved. Many plants that are pollinated by insects (in entomophily), bats, or birds (in ornithophily) have highly specialized flowers modified to promote pollination by a specific pollinator that is correspondingly adapted. The first flowering plants in the fossil record had relatively simple flowers. Adaptive speciation quickly gave rise to many diverse groups of plants, and, at the same time, corresponding speciation occurred in certain insect groups. Some groups of plants developed nectar and large sticky pollen, while insects evolved more specialized morphologies to access and collect these rich food sources. In some taxa of plants and insects, the relationship has become dependent, where the plant species can only be pollinated by one species of insect.


title: Symbiosis

text: The acacia ant ("Pseudomyrmex ferruginea") is an obligate plant ant that protects at least five species of "Acacia" ("Vachellia") from preying insects and from other plants competing for sunlight, and the tree provides nourishment and shelter for the ant and its larvae.


title: Symbiosis

text: Seed dispersal is the movement, spread or transport of seeds away from the parent plant. Plants have limited mobility and rely upon a variety of dispersal vectors to transport their propagules, including both abiotic vectors such as the wind and living (biotic) vectors like birds. In order to attract animals, these plants evolved a set of morphological characters such as fruit colour, mass, and persistence correlated to particular seed dispersal agents. For example, plants may evolve conspicuous fruit colours to attract avian frugivores, and birds may learn to associate such colours with a food resource.


title: Symbiosis

text: In a sense derived from its biological meaning, "symbiosis" can also refer to mutually beneficial business relationships, for example where a manufacturer of products for sale ensures that its distributors are adequately stocked with supplies to meet anticipated demand.


title: ECMAScript

text: ECMAScript (; ES) is a JavaScript standard intended to ensure the interoperability of web pages across different browsers. It is standardized by Ecma International in the document ECMA-262.


title: ECMAScript

text: ECMAScript is commonly used for client-side scripting on the World Wide Web, and it is increasingly being used for writing server-side applications and services using Node.js and other runtime environments.


title: ECMAScript

text: ECMA-262, or the "ECMAScript Language Specification", defines the "ECMAScript Language", or just ECMAScript. ECMA-262 specifies only language syntax and the semantics of the core API, such as , , and , while valid implementations of JavaScript add their own functionality such as input-output and file-system handling.


title: ECMAScript

text: The ECMAScript specification is a standardized specification of a scripting language developed by Brendan Eich of Netscape; initially named Mocha, then LiveScript, and finally JavaScript. In December 1995, Sun Microsystems and Netscape announced JavaScript in a press release. In November 1996, Netscape announced a meeting of the Ecma International standards organization to advance the standardization of JavaScript. The first edition of ECMA-262 was adopted by the Ecma General Assembly in June 1997. Several editions of the language standard have been published since then. The name "ECMAScript" was a compromise between the organizations involved in standardizing the language, especially Netscape and Microsoft, whose disputes dominated the early standards sessions. Eich commented that "ECMAScript was always an unwanted trade name that sounds like a skin disease." ECMAScript has been formalized through operational semantics by work at Stanford University and the Department of Computing, Imperial College London for security analysis and standardization.


title: ECMAScript

text: ECMAScript JavaScript supports C style structured programming. Previously, JavaScript only supported function scoping using the keyword codice_1, but ECMAScript 2015 added the keywords codice_2 and codice_3 allowing JavaScript to support both block scoping and function scoping. JavaScript supports automatic semicolon insertion, meaning that semicolons that are normally used to terminate a statement in C may be omitted in JavaScript.


title: ECMAScript

text: Like C-style languages, control flow is done with the , , / , / , and statements. Functions are weakly typed and may accept and return any type. Arguments not provided default to .


title: ECMAScript

text: ECMAScript is weakly typed. This means that certain types are assigned implicitly based on the operation being performed. However, there are several quirks in JavaScript's implementation of the conversion of a variable from one type to another. These quirks have been the subject of a talk entitled "Wat".


title: ECMAScript

text: ECMAScript is dynamically typed. Thus, a type is associated with a value rather than an expression. ECMAScript supports various ways to test the type of objects, including duck typing.


title: ECMAScript

text: Since ES 2015, transpiling JavaScript has become very common. Transpilation is a source-to-source compilation in which newer versions of JavaScript are used, and a transpiler rewrites the source code so that it is supported by older browsers. Usually, transpilers transpile down to ES3 to maintain compatibility with all versions of browsers. The settings to transpiling to a specific version can be configured according to need. Transpiling adds an extra step to the build process and is sometimes done to avoid needing polyfills. Polyfills create new features for older environments that lack them. Polyfills do this at runtime in the interpreter, such as the user's browser or on the server. Instead, transpiling rewrites the ECMA code itself during the build phase of development before it reaches the interpreter.


title: ECMAScript

text: Test262 is an ECMAScript conformance test suite that can be used to check how closely a JavaScript implementation follows the ECMAScript Specification. The test suite contains thousands of individual tests, each of which tests some specific requirement(s) of the ECMAScript specification. The development of Test262 is a project of the Ecma Technical Committee 39 (TC39). The testing framework and individual tests are created by member organizations of TC39 and contributed to Ecma for use in Test262.


title: ECMAScript

text: Important contributions were made by Google (Sputnik testsuite) and Microsoft who both contributed thousands of tests.


title: ECMAScript

text: The Test262 testsuite consisted of tests . ECMAScript specifications through ES7 are well-supported in major web browsers. The table below shows the conformance rate for current versions of software with respect to the most recent editions of ECMAScript.


title: Kyoto Animation

text: , often abbreviated , is a Japanese animation studio and light novel publisher located in Uji, Kyoto Prefecture. Founded in 1985 by Yoko and Hideaki Hatta, it has produced anime works including "The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya" (2006), "Clannad" (2007), "K-On!" (2009), "Free!" (2013), "Sound! Euphonium" (2015), "A Silent Voice" (2016), and "Violet Evergarden" (2018).


title: Kyoto Animation

text: Kyoto Animation was co-founded in 1985 by married couple Yoko and Hideaki Hatta; it became a limited company in 1985 and a corporation in 1999. Yoko Hatta, who serves as the company's vice president, had worked as a painter at Mushi Production until she moved to Kyoto after marrying her husband, who serves as president. The company's logo originates from the kanji "kyō" (), the first character of Kyoto ().


title: Kyoto Animation

text: Since 2009, Kyoto Animation has hosted the annual Kyoto Animation Awards in three categories: original novels, manga, and scenarios. Some winning submissions are published under the company's KA Esuma Bunko imprint, and have a chance of being later adapted as anime. "Love, Chunibyo & Other Delusions", "Free!", "Beyond the Boundary" and "Myriad Colors Phantom World" were based on novels that received an honorable mention in this competition. In 2014, the novel "Violet Evergarden" became the first and only work so far to win a grand prize in any of the three categories.


title: Kyoto Animation

text: Kyoto Animation has become recognized for its high production values and "sensitivity to the wonders and quandaries of ordinary life". Unlike most animation studios, the company's employees are salaried rather than freelance workers, and are trained in-house. These practices have been cited as encouraging employees to focus on frame quality rather than production quotas. The company has received praise for the positive treatment of its staff, and was honored by Women in Animation with its Diversity Award in 2020 for its efforts in creating a gender-balanced workforce and encouraging women to enter the industry.


title: Kyoto Animation

text: In April 2020, the company announced that it would put its work on hiatus for one month due to the COVID-19 pandemic, later extending the period to the end of May.


title: Kyoto Animation

text: An affiliate company, , was established in 2000 to assist production at Kyoto Animation. Originally established as the studio's Osaka office, it was incorporated as a limited company in 2000, then a corporation in 2010. Both companies are run by Hideaki Hatta and are run jointly as one. They produce up-and-coming works under the Animation Do label with Kyoto Animation as their main contractor and works where they work as one company alongside Kyoto Animation. They work on most Kyoto Animation projects and many of them have joint signatures. On September 16, 2020, it was announced by the National Printing Bureau's "Kanpō" publication that Kyoto Animation absorbed Animation Do, which includes all rights and associated properties.


title: Kyoto Animation

text: On the morning of July 18, 2019, an arson fire at Kyoto Animation's first studio in Fushimi killed 36 people (including directors Yasuhiro Takemoto and Yoshiji Kigami), injured 34 others (including the suspect) in varying degrees, and destroyed most of the building's materials and computers. The suspect, 41-year-old Shinji Aoba, later admitted to committing the attack.


title: Mary Anning

text: Mary Anning (21 May 1799 – 9 March 1847) was an English fossil collector, dealer, and palaeontologist who became known around the world for the discoveries she made in Jurassic marine fossil beds in the cliffs along the English Channel at Lyme Regis in the county of Dorset in Southwest England. Anning's findings contributed to changes in scientific thinking about prehistoric life and the history of the Earth.


title: Mary Anning

text: Anning searched for fossils in the area's Blue Lias and Charmouth Mudstone cliffs, particularly during the winter months when landslides exposed new fossils that had to be collected quickly before they were lost to the sea. Her discoveries included the first correctly identified ichthyosaur skeleton when she was twelve years old; the first two nearly complete plesiosaur skeletons; the first pterosaur skeleton located outside Germany; and fish fossils. Her observations played a key role in the discovery that coprolites, known as bezoar stones at the time, were fossilised faeces, and she also discovered that belemnite fossils contained fossilised ink sacs like those of modern cephalopods.


title: Mary Anning

text: Anning struggled financially for much of her life. As a woman, she was not eligible to join the Geological Society of London and she did not always receive full credit for her scientific contributions. However, her friend, geologist Henry De la Beche, who painted "Duria Antiquior", the first widely circulated pictorial representation of a scene from prehistoric life derived from fossil reconstructions, based it largely on fossils Anning had found and sold prints of it for her benefit. Anning became well known in geological circles in Britain, Europe, and America, and was consulted on issues of anatomy as well as fossil collecting. The only scientific writing of hers published in her lifetime appeared in the "Magazine of Natural History" in 1839, an extract from a letter that Anning had written to the magazine's editor questioning one of its claims.


title: Mary Anning

text: After her death in 1847, Anning's unusual life story attracted increasing interest. An anonymous article about Anning's life was published in February 1865 in Charles Dickens' literary magazine "All the Year Round". The profile, "Mary Anning, The Fossil Finder," was long attributed to Dickens himself but, in 2014, historians of palaeontology Michael A. Taylor and Hugh S. Torrens identified Henry Stuart Fagan as the author, noting that Fagan's work was "neither original nor reliable" and "introduced errors into the Anning literature which are still problematic." Specifically, they noted that Fagan had largely and inaccurately plagiarised his article from an earlier account of Anning's life and work by Dorset native Henry Rowland Brown, from the second edition of Brown's 1859 guidebook, "The Beauties of Lyme Regis."


title: Mary Anning

text: Mary Anning was born in Lyme Regis in Dorset, England, on 21 May 1799. Her father, Richard Anning ("c".1766–1810), was a cabinetmaker and carpenter who supplemented his income by mining the coastal cliff-side fossil beds near the town, and selling his finds to tourists; her mother was Mary Moore ("c".1764–1842) known as Molly. Anning's parents married on 8 August 1793 in Blandford Forum and moved to Lyme, living in a house built on the town's bridge. They attended the Dissenter chapel on Coombe Street, whose worshippers initially called themselves independents and later became known as Congregationalists. Shelley Emling writes that the family lived so near to the sea that the same storms that swept along the cliffs to reveal the fossils sometimes flooded the Annings' home, on one occasion forcing them to crawl out of an upstairs bedroom window to avoid drowning.


title: Mary Anning

text: Molly and Richard had ten children. The first child, also Mary, was born in 1794. She was followed by another daughter, who died almost at once; Joseph in 1796; and another son in 1798, who died in infancy. In December that year, the oldest child, (the first Mary) then four years old, died after her clothes caught fire, possibly while adding wood shavings to the fire. The incident was reported in the "Bath Chronicle" on 27 December 1798: "A child, four years of age of Mr. R. Anning, a cabinetmaker of Lyme, was left by the mother for about five minutes ... in a room where there were some shavings ... The girl's clothes caught fire and she was so dreadfully burnt as to cause her death."


title: Mary Anning

text: When Anning was born five months later, she was thus named Mary after her dead sister. More children were born after her, but none of them survived more than a year or two. Only the second Mary Anning and her brother Joseph, who was three years older than her, survived to adulthood. The high childhood mortality rate for the Anning family was not unusual. Almost half the children born in the UK in the 19th century died before the age of five, and in the crowded living conditions of early 19th-century Lyme Regis, infant deaths from diseases like smallpox and measles were common.


title: Mary Anning

text: On 19 August 1800, when Anning was 15 months old, an event occurred that became part of local lore. She was being held by a neighbour, Elizabeth Haskings, who was standing with two other women under an elm tree watching an equestrian show being put on by a travelling company of horsemen when lightning struck the tree – killing all three women below. Onlookers rushed the infant home where she was revived in a bath of hot water. A local doctor declared her survival miraculous. Anning's family said she had been a sickly baby before the event but afterwards she seemed to blossom. For years afterwards members of her community would attribute the child's curiosity, intelligence and lively personality to the incident.


title: Mary Anning

text: Anning's education was extremely limited, but she was able to attend a Congregationalist Sunday school, where she learned to read and write. Congregationalist doctrine, unlike that of the Church of England at the time, emphasised the importance of education for the poor. Her prized possession was a bound volume of the "Dissenters' Theological Magazine and Review", in which the family's pastor, the Reverend James Wheaton, had published two essays, one insisting that God had created the world in six days, the other urging dissenters to study the new science of geology.


title: Mary Anning

text: By the late 18th century, Lyme Regis had become a popular seaside resort, especially after 1792 when the outbreak of the French Revolutionary Wars made travel to the European mainland dangerous for the English gentry, and increasing numbers of wealthy and middle-class tourists were arriving there. Even before Anning's time, locals supplemented their income by selling what were called "curios" to visitors. These were fossils with colourful local names such as "snake-stones" (ammonites), "devil's fingers" (belemnites), and "verteberries" (vertebrae), to which were sometimes attributed medicinal and mystical properties. Fossil collecting was in vogue in the late 18th and early 19th century, at first as a pastime, but gradually transforming into a science as the importance of fossils to geology and biology was understood. The source of most of these fossils were the coastal cliffs around Lyme Regis, part of a geological formation known as the Blue Lias. This consists of alternating layers of limestone and shale, laid down as sediment on a shallow seabed early in the Jurassic period (about 210–195 million years ago). It is one of the richest fossil locations in Britain. The cliffs could be dangerously unstable, however, especially in winter when rain caused landslides. It was precisely during the winter months that collectors were drawn to the cliffs because the landslides often exposed new fossils.


title: Mary Anning

text: Their father, Richard, often took Anning and her brother Joseph on fossil-hunting expeditions to supplement the family's income. They offered their discoveries for sale to tourists on a table outside their home. This was a difficult time for England's poor; the French Revolutionary Wars, and the Napoleonic Wars that followed, caused food shortages. The price of wheat almost tripled between 1792 and 1812, but wages for the working class remained almost unchanged. In Dorset, the rising price of bread caused political unrest, even riots. At one point, Richard Anning was involved in organising a protest against food shortages.


title: Mary Anning

text: In addition, the family's status as religious dissenters—not followers of the Church of England—attracted disabilities. In the earlier nineteenth century, those who refused to subscribe to the Articles of the Church of England were still not allowed to study at Oxford or Cambridge or to take certain positions in the army, and were excluded by law from several professions. Her father had been suffering from tuberculosis and injuries he suffered from a fall off a cliff. When he died in November 1810 (aged 44), he left the family with debts and no savings, forcing them to apply for poor relief.


title: Mary Anning

text: The family continued collecting and selling fossils together and set up a table of curiosities near the coach stop at a local inn. Although the stories about Anning tend to focus on her successes, Dennis Dean writes that her mother and brother were astute collectors too, and Anning's parents had sold fossils before the father's death.


title: Mary Anning

text: Their first well-known find was in 1811 when Mary Anning was 12; her brother Joseph dug up a 4-foot ichthyosaur skull, and a few months later Anning herself found the rest of the skeleton. Henry Hoste Henley of Sandringham House in Sandringham, Norfolk, who was lord of the manor of Colway, near Lyme Regis, paid the family about £23 for it, and in turn he sold it to William Bullock, a well-known collector, who displayed it in London. There it generated interest, as public awareness of the age of the earth and the variety of prehistoric creatures was growing. It was later sold for £45 and five shillings at auction in May 1819 as a "Crocodile in a Fossil State" to Charles Konig, of the British Museum, who had already suggested the name "Ichthyosaurus" for it.


title: Mary Anning

text: Anning's mother Molly initially ran the fossil business after her husband Richard's death, but it is unclear how much actual fossil collecting Molly did herself. As late as 1821, Molly wrote to the British Museum to request payment for a specimen. Her son Joseph's time was increasingly taken up by his apprenticeship to an upholsterer, but he remained active in the fossil business until at least 1825. By that time, Mary Anning had assumed the leading role in the family specimen business.


title: Mary Anning

text: The family's keenest customer was Lieutenant-Colonel Thomas James Birch, later Bosvile, a wealthy collector from Lincolnshire, who bought several specimens from them. In 1820 Birch became disturbed by the family's poverty. Having made no major discoveries for a year, they were at the point of having to sell their furniture to pay the rent. So he decided to auction on their behalf the fossils he had purchased from them. He wrote to the palaeontologist Gideon Mantell on 5 March that year to say that the sale was "for the benefit of the poor woman and her son and daughter at Lyme, who have in truth found almost "all" the fine things which have been submitted to scientific investigation ... I may never again possess what I am about to part with, yet in doing it I shall have the satisfaction of knowing that the money will be well applied." The auction was held at Bullocks in London on 15 May 1820, and raised £400 (the equivalent of £ in 2022). How much of that was given to the Annings is not known, but it seems to have placed the family on a steadier financial footing, and with buyers arriving from Paris and Vienna, the three-day event raised the family's profile within the geological community.


title: Mary Anning

text: Anning continued to support herself selling fossils. Her primary stock in trade consisted of invertebrate fossils such as ammonite and belemnite shells, which were common in the area and sold for a few shillings. Vertebrate fossils, such as ichthyosaur skeletons, sold for more, but were much rarer. Collecting them was dangerous winter work. In 1823, an article in "The Bristol Mirror" said of her:


title: Mary Anning

text: The risks of Anning's profession were illustrated when in October 1833 she barely avoided being killed by a landslide that buried her black-and-white terrier, Tray, her constant companion when she went collecting. Anning wrote to a friend, Charlotte Murchison, in November of that year: "Perhaps you will laugh when I say that the death of my old faithful dog has quite upset me, the cliff that fell upon him and killed him in a moment before my eyes, and close to my feet ... it was but a moment between me and the same fate."


title: Mary Anning

text: As Anning continued to make important finds, her reputation grew. On 10 December 1823, she found the first complete "Plesiosaurus", and in 1828 the first British example of the flying reptiles known as pterosaurs, called a flying dragon when it was displayed at the British Museum, followed by a "Squaloraja" fish skeleton in 1829. Despite her limited education, she read as much of the scientific literature as she could obtain, and often, laboriously hand-copied papers borrowed from others. Palaeontologist Christopher McGowan examined a copy Anning made of an 1824 paper by William Conybeare on marine reptile fossils and noted that the copy included several pages of her detailed technical illustrations that he was hard-pressed to tell apart from the original. She also dissected modern animals including both fish and cuttlefish to gain a better understanding of the anatomy of some of the fossils with which she was working. Lady Harriet Silvester, the widow of the former Recorder of the City of London, visited Lyme in 1824 and described Anning in her diary:


title: Mary Anning

text: In 1826, at the age of 27, Anning managed to save enough money to purchase a home with a glass store-front window for her shop, "Anning's Fossil Depot". The business had become important enough that the move was covered in the local paper, which noted that the shop had a fine ichthyosaur skeleton on display. Many geologists and fossil collectors from Europe and America visited her at Lyme, including the geologist George William Featherstonhaugh, who called Anning a "very clever funny Creature." He purchased fossils from Anning for the newly opened New York Lyceum of Natural History in 1827. King Frederick Augustus II of Saxony visited her shop in 1844 and purchased an ichthyosaur skeleton for his extensive natural history collection. The king's physician and aide, Carl Gustav Carus, wrote in his journal:


title: Mary Anning

text: Carus asked Anning to write her name and address in his pocketbook for future reference—she wrote it as "Mary Annins"—and when she handed it back to him she told him: "I am well known throughout the whole of Europe". As time passed, Anning's confidence in her knowledge grew, and in 1839 she wrote to the "Magazine of Natural History" to question the claim made in an article, that a recently discovered fossil of the prehistoric shark "Hybodus" represented a new genus, as an error since she had discovered the existence of fossil sharks with both straight and hooked teeth many years ago. The extract from the letter that the magazine printed was the only writing of Anning's published in the scientific literature during her lifetime. Some personal letters written by Anning, such as her correspondence with Frances Augusta Bell, were published while she was alive, however.


title: Mary Anning

text: As a woman, Anning was treated as an outsider to the scientific community. At the time in Britain, women were not allowed to vote, hold public office, or attend university. The newly formed, but increasingly influential Geological Society of London did not allow women to become members, or even to attend meetings as guests. The only occupations generally open to working-class women were farm labour, domestic service, and work in the newly opened factories.


title: Mary Anning

text: Although Anning knew more about fossils and geology than many of the wealthy fossilists to whom she sold, it was always the gentlemen geologists who published the scientific descriptions of the specimens she found, often neglecting to mention Anning's name. She became resentful of this. Anna Pinney, a young woman who sometimes accompanied Anning while she collected, wrote: "She says the world has used her ill ... these men of learning have sucked her brains, and made a great deal of publishing works, of which she furnished the contents, while she derived none of the advantages." Anning herself wrote in a letter: "The world has used me so unkindly, I fear it has made me suspicious of everyone". Torrens writes that these slights to Anning were part of a larger pattern of ignoring the contributions of working-class people in early 19th-century scientific literature. Often a fossil would be found by a quarryman, construction worker, or road worker who would sell it to a wealthy collector, and it was the latter who was credited if the find was of scientific interest.


title: Mary Anning

text: Along with purchasing specimens, many geologists visited Anning to collect fossils or discuss anatomy and classification. Henry De la Beche and Anning became friends as teenagers following his move to Lyme, and he, Anning, and sometimes her brother Joseph, went fossil-hunting together. De la Beche and Anning kept in touch as he became one of Britain's leading geologists. William Buckland, who lectured on geology at the University of Oxford, often visited Lyme on his Christmas vacations and was frequently seen hunting for fossils with Anning. It was to him Anning made what would prove to be the scientifically important suggestion (in a letter auctioned for over £100,000 in 2020 ) that the strange conical objects known as bezoar stones were really the fossilised faeces of ichthyosaurs or plesiosaurs. Buckland would name the objects coprolites. In 1839 Buckland, Conybeare, and Richard Owen visited Lyme together so that Anning could lead them all on a fossil-collecting excursion.


title: Mary Anning

text: Anning also assisted Thomas Hawkins with his efforts to collect ichthyosaur fossils at Lyme in the 1830s. She was aware of his penchant to "enhance" the fossils he collected. Anning wrote: "he is such an enthusiast that he makes things as he imagines they ought to be; and not as they are really found...". A few years later there was a public scandal when it was discovered that Hawkins had inserted fake bones to make some ichthyosaur skeletons seem more complete, and later sold them to the government for the British Museum's collection without the appraisers knowing about the additions.


title: Mary Anning

text: The Swiss palaeontologist Louis Agassiz visited Lyme Regis in 1834 and worked with Anning to obtain and study fish fossils found in the region. He was so impressed by Anning and her friend Elizabeth Philpot that he wrote in his journal: "Miss Philpot and Mary Anning have been able to show me with utter certainty which are the ichthyodorulite's dorsal fins of sharks that correspond to different types." He thanked both of them for their help in his book, "Studies of Fossil Fish".


title: Mary Anning

text: Another leading British geologist, Roderick Murchison, did some of his first fieldwork in southwest England, including Lyme, accompanied by his wife, Charlotte. Murchison wrote that they decided Charlotte should stay behind in Lyme for a few weeks to "become a good practical fossilist, by working with the celebrated Mary Anning of that place...". Charlotte and Anning became lifelong friends and correspondents. Charlotte, who travelled widely and met many prominent geologists through her work with her husband, helped Anning build her network of customers throughout Europe, and she stayed with the Murchisons when she visited London in 1829. Anning's correspondents included Charles Lyell, who wrote to ask her opinion on how the sea was affecting the coastal cliffs around Lyme, as well as Adam Sedgwick—one of her earliest customers—who taught geology at the University of Cambridge and who numbered Charles Darwin among his students. Gideon Mantell, discoverer of the dinosaur Iguanodon, also visited Anning at her shop.


title: Mary Anning

text: By 1830, because of difficult economic conditions in Britain that reduced the demand for fossils, coupled with long gaps between major finds, Anning was having financial problems again. Her friend, the geologist Henry De la Beche assisted her by commissioning Georg Scharf to make a lithographic print based on De la Beche's watercolour painting, "Duria Antiquior", portraying life in prehistoric Dorset that was based largely on fossils Anning had found. De la Beche sold copies of the print to his fellow geologists and other wealthy friends and donated the proceeds to Anning. It became the first such scene from what later became known as deep time to be widely circulated. In December 1830, Anning finally made another major find, a skeleton of a new type of plesiosaur, which sold for £200.


title: Mary Anning

text: It was around this time that Anning switched from attending the local Congregational church, where she had been baptised and in which she and her family had always been active members, to the Anglican church. The change was prompted in part by a decline in Congregational attendance that began in 1828 when its popular pastor, John Gleed, a fellow fossil collector, left for the United States to campaign against slavery. He was replaced by the less likeable Ebenezer Smith. The greater social respectability of the established church, in which some of Anning's gentleman geologist customers such as Buckland, Conybeare, and Sedgwick were ordained clergy, was also a factor. Anning, who was devoutly religious, actively supported her new church as she had her old.


title: Mary Anning

text: Anning suffered another serious financial setback in 1835 when she lost most of her life savings, about £300, in a bad investment. Sources differ somewhat on what exactly went wrong. Deborah Cadbury says that she invested with a conman who swindled her and disappeared with the money, but Shelley Emling writes that it is not clear whether the man ran off with the money or whether he died suddenly leaving Anning with no way to recover the investment. Concerned about Anning's financial situation, her old friend William Buckland persuaded the British Association for the Advancement of Science and the British government to award her an annuity, known as a civil list pension, in return for her many contributions to the science of geology. The £25 annual pension gave Anning some financial security.


title: Mary Anning

text: Anning died from breast cancer at the age of 47 on 9 March 1847. Her fossil work had tailed off during the last few years of her life because of her illness, and as some townspeople misinterpreted the effects of the increasing doses of laudanum she was taking for the pain, there had been gossip in Lyme that she had a drinking problem. The regard in which Anning was held by the geological community was shown in 1846 when, upon learning of her cancer diagnosis, the Geological Society raised money from its members to help with her expenses and the council of the newly created Dorset County Museum made Anning an honorary member. She was buried on 15 March in the churchyard of St Michael's, the local parish church. Members of the Geological Society contributed to a stained-glass window in Anning's memory, unveiled in 1850. It depicts the six corporal "acts of mercy"—feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, clothing the naked, sheltering the homeless, visiting prisoners and the sick, and the inscription reads: "This window is sacred to the memory of Mary Anning of this parish, who died 9 March AD 1847 and is erected by the vicar and some members of the Geological Society of London in commemoration of her usefulness in furthering the science of geology, as also of her benevolence of heart and integrity of life."


title: Mary Anning

text: After Anning's death, Henry De la Beche, president of the Geological Society, wrote a eulogy that he read to a meeting of the society and published in its quarterly transactions, the first such eulogy given for a woman. These were honours normally only accorded to fellows of the society, which did not admit women until 1904. The eulogy began:


title: Mary Anning

text: I cannot close this notice of our losses by death without adverting to that of one, who though not placed among even the easier classes of society, but one who had to earn her daily bread by her labour, yet contributed by her talents and untiring researches in no small degree to our knowledge of the great Enalio-Saurians, and other forms of organic life entombed in the vicinity of Lyme Regis ...


title: Mary Anning

text: Henry Stuart Fagan wrote an article about Anning's life in February 1865 in Charles Dickens' literary magazine "All the Year Round" (though the article was largely plagiarised and was long mistakenly attributed to Dickens) that emphasised the difficulties Anning had overcome, especially the scepticism of her fellow townspeople. He ended the article with: "The carpenter's daughter has won a name for herself, and has deserved to win it."


title: Mary Anning

text: Anning's first famous discovery was made shortly after her father's death when she was still a child of about 12. In 1811 (some sources say 1810 or 1809) her brother Joseph found a skull, but failed to locate the rest of the animal. After Joseph told Anning to look between the cliffs at Lyme Regis and Charmouth, she found the skeleton— long in all—a few months later. The family hired workmen to dig it out in November that year, an event covered by the local press on 9 November, who identified the fossil as a crocodile.


title: Mary Anning

text: Other ichthyosaur remains had been discovered in years past at Lyme and elsewhere, but the specimen found by the Annings was the first to come to the attention of scientific circles in London. It was purchased by the lord of a local manor, who passed it to William Bullock for public display in London where it created a sensation. At a time when most people in Britain still believed in a literal interpretation of Genesis, that the Earth was only a few thousand years old and that species did not evolve or become extinct, the find raised questions in scientific and religious circles about what the new science of geology was revealing about ancient life and the history of the Earth. Its notoriety increased when Sir Everard Home wrote a series of six papers, starting in 1814, describing it for the Royal Society. The papers never mentioned who had collected the fossil, and in the first one he even mistakenly credited the painstaking cleaning and preparation of the fossil performed by Anning to the staff at Bullock's museum. Perplexed by the creature, Home kept changing his mind about its classification, first thinking it was a kind of fish, then thinking it might have some kind of affinity with the duck-billed platypus (only recently known to science); finally in 1819 he reasoned it might be a kind of intermediate form between salamanders and lizards, which led him to propose naming it Proteo-Saurus. By then Charles Konig, an assistant curator of the British Museum, had already suggested the name "Ichthyosaurus" (fish lizard) for the specimen and that name stuck. Konig purchased the skeleton for the museum in 1819. The skull of the specimen is still in the possession of the Natural History Museum in London (to which the fossil collections of the British Museum were transferred later in the century), but at some point, it became separated from the rest of the skeleton, the location of which is not known.


title: Mary Anning

text: Anning found several other ichthyosaur fossils between 1815 and 1819, including almost complete skeletons of varying sizes. In 1821, William Conybeare and Henry De la Beche, both members of the Geological Society of London, collaborated on a paper that analysed in detail the specimens found by Anning and others. They concluded that ichthyosaurs were a previously unknown type of marine reptile, and based on differences in tooth structure, they concluded that there had been at least three species. Also in 1821, Anning found the skeleton from which the species "Ichthyosaurus platydon" (now "Temnodontosaurus platyodon") would be named. In the 1980s it was determined that the first ichthyosaur specimen found by Joseph and Mary Anning was also a member of "Temnodontosaurus platyodon".


title: Mary Anning

text: In 2022, two plaster casts of the first complete ichthyosaur skeleton fossil found by Anning that was destroyed in the bombing of London during the Second World War, were discovered in separate collections. One is at the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale University in the USA and the other at the Natural History Museum in Berlin, Germany. The casts may be secondary, being made from a direct cast of the fossil, but are determined to be of good condition, "historically important", and likely taken from the specimen put for sale at auction by Anning in 1820.


title: Mary Anning

text: In the same 1821 paper he co-authored with Henry De la Beche on ichthyosaur anatomy, William Conybeare named and described the genus "Plesiosaurus" (near lizard), called so because he thought it more like modern reptiles than the ichthyosaur had been. The description was based on a number of fossils, the most complete of them specimen OUMNH J.50146, a paddle and vertebral column that had been obtained by Lieutenant-Colonel Thomas James Birch. Christopher McGowan has hypothesised that this specimen had originally been much more complete and had been collected by Anning, during the winter of 1820/1821. If so, it would have been Anning's next major discovery, providing essential information about the newly recognised type of marine reptile. No records by Anning of the find are known. The paper thanked Birch for giving Conybeare access to it, but does not mention who discovered and prepared it.


title: Mary Anning

text: In 1823, Anning discovered a second, much more complete plesiosaur skeleton, specimen BMNH 22656. When Conybeare presented his analysis of plesiosaur anatomy to a meeting of the Geological Society in 1824, he again failed to mention Anning by name, even though she had possibly collected both skeletons and had made the sketch of the second skeleton he used in his presentation. Conybeare's presentation was made at the same meeting at which William Buckland described the dinosaur "Megalosaurus" and the combination created a sensation in scientific circles. The second fossil was named and described as "Plesiosaurus dolichodeirus" and is the type specimen (holotype) of this species, which itself is the type species of the genus.


title: Mary Anning

text: Conybeare's presentation followed the resolution of a controversy over the legitimacy of one of the fossils. The fact that the plesiosaur's long neck had an unprecedented 35 vertebrae raised the suspicions of the eminent French anatomist Georges Cuvier when he reviewed Anning's drawings of the second skeleton, and he wrote to Conybeare suggesting the possibility that the find was a fake produced by combining fossil bones from different kinds of animals. Fraud was far from unknown among early 19th-century fossil collectors, and if the controversy had not been resolved promptly, the accusation could have seriously damaged Anning's ability to sell fossils to other geologists. Cuvier's accusation had resulted in a special meeting of the Geological Society earlier in 1824, which, after some debate, had concluded the skeleton was legitimate. Cuvier later admitted he had acted in haste and was mistaken.


title: Mary Anning

text: Anning discovered yet another important and nearly complete plesiosaur skeleton in 1830. It was named "Plesiosaurus macrocephalus" by William Buckland and was described in an 1840 paper by Richard Owen. Once again Owen mentioned the wealthy gentleman who had purchased the fossil and made it available for examination, but not the woman who had discovered and prepared it.


title: Mary Anning

text: Anning found what a contemporary newspaper article called an unrivalled specimen of "Dapedium politum". This was a ray-finned fish, which would be described in 1828. In December of that same year she made an important find consisting of the partial skeleton of a pterosaur. In 1829 William Buckland described it as "Pterodactylus macronyx" (later renamed "Dimorphodon macronyx" by Richard Owen), and unlike many other such occasions, Buckland credited Anning with the discovery in his paper. It was the first pterosaur skeleton found outside Germany, and it created a public sensation when displayed at the British Museum. Recent research has found that these creatures were not inclined to fly continuously in their search for fish.


title: Mary Anning

text: In December 1829 she found a fossil fish, "Squaloraja", which attracted attention because it had characteristics intermediate between sharks and rays.


title: Mary Anning

text: Vertebrate fossil finds, especially of marine reptiles, made Anning's reputation, but she made numerous other contributions to early palaeontology. In 1826 Anning discovered what appeared to be a chamber containing dried ink inside a belemnite fossil. She showed it to her friend Elizabeth Philpot who was able to revivify the ink and use it to illustrate some of her own ichthyosaur fossils. Soon other local artists were doing the same, as more such fossilised ink chambers were discovered. Anning noted how closely the fossilised chambers resembled the ink sacs of modern squid and cuttlefish, which she had dissected to understand the anatomy of fossil cephalopods, and this led William Buckland to publish the conclusion that Jurassic belemnites had used ink for defence just as many modern cephalopods do. It was also Anning who noticed that the oddly shaped fossils then known as "bezoar stones" were sometimes found in the abdominal region of ichthyosaur skeletons. She noted that if such stones were broken open they often contained fossilised fish bones and scales, and sometimes bones from small ichthyosaurs. Anning suspected the stones were fossilised faeces and suggested so to Buckland in 1824. After further investigation and comparison with similar fossils found in other places, Buckland published that conclusion in 1829 and named them coprolites. In contrast to the finding of the plesiosaur skeletons a few years earlier, for which she was not credited, when Buckland presented his findings on coprolites to the Geological Society, he mentioned Anning by name and praised her skill and industry in helping to solve the mystery.


title: Mary Anning

text: Anning's discoveries became key pieces of evidence for extinction. Georges Cuvier had argued for the reality of extinction in the late 1790s based on his analysis of fossils of mammals such as mammoths. Nevertheless, until the early 1820s it was still believed by many scientifically literate people that just as new species did not appear, so existing ones did not become extinct—in part because they felt that extinction would imply that God's creation had been imperfect; any oddities found were explained away as belonging to animals still living somewhere in an unexplored region of the Earth. The bizarre nature of the fossils found by Anning, — some, such as the plesiosaur, so unlike any known living creature — struck a major blow against this idea.


title: Mary Anning

text: The ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs, and pterosaur she found, along with the first dinosaur fossils which were discovered by Gideon Mantell and William Buckland during the same period, showed that during previous eras the Earth was inhabited by creatures different from those living today, and provided important support for another controversial suggestion of Cuvier's: that there had been an "age of reptiles" when reptiles rather than mammals had been the dominant form of animal life. This phrase became popular after the publication in 1831 of a paper by Mantell entitled "The Age of Reptiles" that summarised the evidence that there had been an extended geological era when giant reptiles had swarmed the land, air, and sea. These discoveries also played a key role in the development of a new discipline of geohistorical analysis within geology in the 1820s that sought to understand the history of the Earth by using evidence from fossils to reconstruct extinct organisms and the environments in which they lived. This discipline eventually came to be called palaeontology. Illustrations of scenes from "deep time" (now known as palaeoart), such as Henry De la Beche's ground-breaking painting "Duria Antiquior", helped convince people that it was possible to understand life in the distant past. De la Beche had been inspired to create the painting by a vivid description of the food chain of the Lias by William Buckland that was based on analysis of coprolites. The study of coprolites, pioneered by Anning and Buckland, would prove to be a valuable tool for understanding ancient ecosystems.


title: Mary Anning

text: Throughout the 20th century, beginning with H. A. Forde and his "The Heroine of Lyme Regis: The Story of Mary Anning the Celebrated Geologist" (1925), a number of writers saw Anning's life as inspirational. According to P. J. McCartney in "Henry De la Beche: Observations on an Observer" (1978), she was the basis of Terry Sullivan's lyrics to the 1908 song which, McCartney claimed, became the popular tongue twister, "She Sells Seashells":


title: Mary Anning

text: However, Stephen Winick of the American Folklife Center has shown that no evidence has been presented for any causal connection between Anning and the lyrics (which are about a music-hall performer who has difficulty with tongue-twisters); in particular, Winick consulted McCartney's original text and discovered that not only did McCartney not provide any sources to support his statement, he merely said that Anning was "reputed to be" the subject of the song. Winick also pointed out that the tongue-twister pre-dated Sullivan by decades, and stated that there is a "very imperfect fit between the details of the song and those of Mary Anning’s life", and "not even a real female character in the song, let alone anyone recognizable as Mary Anning", ultimately concluding that if the song was intended as a tribute to Anning, it is "a pretty ineffective one."


title: Mary Anning

text: Much of the material written about Anning was aimed at children, and tended to focus on her childhood and early career. Much of it was also highly romanticised and not always historically accurate. Anning has been referenced in several historical novels, most notably in "The French Lieutenant's Woman" (1969) by John Fowles, who was critical of the fact that no British scientist had named a species after her in her lifetime. As Anning's biographer Shelley Emling noted, this contrasted with some of the prominent geologists who had used her finds, such as William Buckland and Roderick Murchison, who ended up with multiple fossil species named after them. The only person who did name a species after Anning during her lifetime was the Swiss-American naturalist, Louis Agassiz. In the early 1840s, he named two fossil fish species after Anning – "Acrodus anningiae", and "Belenostomus anningiae" – and another after her friend Elizabeth Philpot. Agassiz was grateful for the help the women had given him in examining fossil fish specimens during his visit to Lyme Regis in 1834. After Anning's death, other species, including the ostracod "Cytherelloidea anningi", and two genera, the therapsid reptile genus "Anningia", and the bivalve mollusc genus "Anningella", were named in her honour. In 2012, the plesiosaur genus "Anningasaura" was named after Anning and the species "Ichthyosaurus anningae" was named after her in 2015.


title: Mary Anning

text: In 1999, on the 200th anniversary of Anning's birth, an international meeting of historians, palaeontologists, fossil collectors, and others interested in her life was held in Lyme Regis. In 2005 the Natural History Museum added Anning, alongside scientists such as Carl Linnaeus, Dorothea Bate, and William Smith, as one of the "gallery characters" (actors dressed in period costumes) it uses to walk around its display cases. In 2007, American playwright/performer Claudia Stevens premiered "Blue Lias, or the Fish Lizard's Whore", a solo play with music by Allen Shearer depicting Anning in later life. Among the presenters of its thirty performances around the Charles Darwin bicentennial were the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, museums of natural history at the University of Michigan and the University of Kansas, and the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History. In 2009, Tracy Chevalier wrote a historical novel entitled "Remarkable Creatures", in which Anning and Elizabeth Philpot were the main characters, and another historical novel about Anning, "Curiosity" by Joan Thomas, was published in March 2010.


title: Mary Anning

text: In 2010, 163 years after her death, the Royal Society included Anning in a list of the ten British women who have most influenced the history of science.


title: Mary Anning

text: In 2018, a new research and survey vessel was launched as "Mary Anning" for Swansea University. and a suite of rooms named after her at the Natural History Museum in South Kensington, London.


title: Mary Anning

text: In August 2018, a campaign called ""Mary Anning Rocks"" was formed by an 11-year-old school girl from Dorset, Evie Swire, supported by her mother Anya Pearson. The campaign was set up to remember Anning in her hometown of Lyme Regis by erecting a statue and creating a learning legacy in her name. Patrons and supporters include Professor Alice Roberts, Sir David Attenborough and novelist Tracy Chevalier. A crowdfunding campaign began but was put on hold. The fundraising campaign, led by the charity "Mary Anning Rocks", rebooted in November 2020. As of January 2021, Evie Swire's campaign had resulted in a commission to sculptor Denise Dutton. The statue was granted planning permission by Dorset Council for a space overlooking Black Ven, where Anning made many of her finds. Alice Roberts and Evie Swire unveiled the statue on 21 May 2022, the 223rd anniversary of Anning's birth. The life-sized bronze statue depicts Anning with hammer and fossil in hand, overlooking the cliffs that still attract fossil hunters today. It is prominently displayed in Lyme Regis on southern England’s Jurassic Coast.


title: Mary Anning

text: A further emergency crowdfunding campaign began in August 2020 to raise funds to bid for a handwritten letter from Anning to William Buckland in 1829 about a box of coprolites (fossil poo) and a new plesiosaur she had discovered. The letter later sold at Sotheby's for £100,800 but the campaign had only raised £18,532.


title: Mary Anning

text: In 2021, the Royal Mint issued sets of commemorative 50 pence (£0.50 sterling) coins called '"The Mary Anning Collection"' minted in acknowledgement of her lack of recognition as 'one of Britain's greatest fossil hunters'. The coins have images of the Temnodontosaurus, the Plesiosaurus and the Dimophodon, which she discovered, and her discoveries were 'often overlooked at a time when the scientific world was dominated by men', and as 'a working-class woman.'


title: Mary Anning

text: Mary Anning appears as a Heroic Spirit belonging to the Lancer class in the web manga "Learn Even More with Manga!", derived from the video game "Fate/Grand Order". Her depiction in that manga brings several features from Anning's life into play, such as fossil-collecting gear, fossils, and live versions of ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs. She later appears in the video game, voiced by Maria Naganawa.


title: Mary Anning

text: Anning served as inspiration for Sarah Perry's fossil-hunting protagonist, Cora, in the 2016 novel "The Essex Serpent".


title: Mary Anning

text: A film based on segments of Anning's life and legacy entitled "Ammonite", directed by Francis Lee, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival on 11 September 2020. Kate Winslet portrays Anning and Saoirse Ronan portrays Charlotte Murchison, with the two engaged in a fictional lesbian relationship. The film was released on 13 November 2020 in the US and 26 March 2021 in the UK. Both the "Ammonite" film release and the "'Mary Anning Rocks"' statue fundraiser were delayed into 2021, due to the coronavirus pandemic.


title: Kashi Vishwanath Temple

text: The Kashi Vishwanath Temple is a famous Hindu temple dedicated to Lord Shiva. It is located in Vishwanath Gali of Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh in India. The temple stands on the western bank of the holy river Ganga, and is one of the twelve Jyotirlingas, the holiest of Shiva temples. The main deity is known by the names Shri Vishwanath and Vishweshwara (IAST: "Vishveshvara or Vishveshvur") literally meaning "Lord of the Universe". Varanasi was called "Kashi" ("shining") in ancient times, and hence the temple is popularly called Kashi Vishwanath Temple.


title: Kashi Vishwanath Temple

text: The temple is considered a central part of worship in the Shaiva culture by Hindu scriptures. It had been demolished several times by the Muslim rulers, most recently by Aurangzeb who constructed the Gyanvapi Mosque on its site. The current structure was built on an adjacent site by the Maratha ruler, Ahilyabai Holkar of Indore in the year 1780.


title: Kashi Vishwanath Temple

text: As per the Shiva Purana, once Brahma (the Hindu God of creation) and Vishnu (the Hindu God of Preservation) had an argument about who was supreme. To test them, Shiva pierced the three worlds as a huge endless pillar of light, the "jyotirlinga". To determine who was mightier Vishnu took the form of a boar and sought out the bottom while Brahma took the form of a swan to fly to the pillar's top. Brahma out of arrogance lied that he had found out the end, offering a katuki flower as witness. Vishnu modestly confessed to being unable to find the bottom. Shiva then took the form of the wrathful Bhairava, cut off Brahma's lying fifth head, and cursed Brahma that he would not be worshipped. Vishnu for his honesty would be worshiped as equal to Shiva with his own temples for all eternity. The "jyotirlinga" is an ancient axis mundi symbol representing the supreme formless (nirguna) reality at the core of creation, out of which the form (saguna) of Shiva appears. The "jyothirlinga" shrines, thus are places where Shiva appeared as a fiery column of light. There are 64 forms of Shiva, not to be confused with Jyotirlingas. Each of the twelve "jyotirlinga" sites take the name of the presiding deity - each considered different manifestation of Shiva. At all these sites, the primary image is "lingam" representing the beginningless and endless "Stambha" pillar, symbolizing the infinite nature of Shiva. The twelve "jyothirlinga" are Somnath in Gujarat, Mallikarjuna at Srisailam in Andhra Pradesh, Mahakaleswar at Ujjain in Madhya Pradesh, Omkareshwar in Madhya Pradesh, Kedarnath in Uttarakhand, Bhimashankar in Maharashtra, Viswanath at Varanasi in Uttar Pradesh, Triambakeshwar in Maharashtra, Vaidyanath Jyotirlinga, Deogarh in Deoghar, Jharkhand, Nageswar at Dwarka in Gujarat, Rameshwar at Rameswaram in Tamil Nadu and Grishneshwar at Aurangabad in Maharashtra.


title: Kashi Vishwanath Temple

text: The Manikarnika Ghat on the banks of Ganges near to the Kashi Vishwanath Temple is considered as a Shakti Pitha, a revered place of worship for the Shaktism sect. The Daksha Yaga, a Shaivite literature is considered as an important literature which is the story about the origin of Shakti Peethas.


title: Kashi Vishwanath Temple

text: Lord Vishweshara is said to be the reigning deity of Varanasi, holding the position of king over all the other deities, as well as all over the inhabitants residing not only within the city itself, but also within the circuit of the "Panchkosi" road (the sacred boundary of Varanasi) extending for about 50 miles.


title: Kashi Vishwanath Temple

text: Madhuri Desai notes accounts of the history of the temple to center around a litany of repeated destruction and re-construction. Pilgrims visiting the present Kashi Vishwanath Temple are informed about the timelessness of the lingam.


title: Kashi Vishwanath Temple

text: The original Vishwanath temple, initially known as the Adi Vishveshwara Temple, was destroyed by the Ghurids in 1194, when Mu'izz al-Din Muhammad ibn Sam returned to India and defeated Jayachandra of Kannauj near Chandawar and afterwards razed the city of Kashi. In few years time, Razia Mosque was constructed in its place. In 1230, the temple was rebuilt near the Avimukteshwara Temple, away from the main site by a Gujarati merchant during the reign of Delhi's Sultan Iltutmish (1211–1266) . It was demolished again during the rule of either Hussain Shah Sharqi (1447–1458) or Sikandar Lodi (1489–1517).


title: Kashi Vishwanath Temple

text: Raja Man Singh built the temple during Mughal emperor Akbar's rule. Raja Todar Mal further re-built the temple in 1585, but orthodox Brahmins chose to boycott the temple, because his daughter was married to Islamic rulers. During the rule of Jahangir, Vir Singh Deo either restored or completed the construction of earlier temple. In 1669, Mughal emperor Aurangzeb destroyed the temple and built the Gyanvapi Mosque in its place. The remains of the erstwhile temple can be seen in the foundation, the columns and at the rear part of the mosque.


title: Kashi Vishwanath Temple

text: In 1742, the Maratha ruler Malhar Rao Holkar made a plan to demolish the mosque and reconstruct Vishweshwar temple at the site. However, his plan did not materialize, partially because of intervention by the Nawab of Awadh, who was given the control of the territory. Around 1750, the Maharaja of Jaipur commissioned a survey of the land around the site, with the objective of purchasing land to rebuild the Kashi Vishwanath temple. However, his plan to rebuild the temple did not materialize either. In 1780, Malhar Rao's daughter-in-law Ahilyabai Holkar rebuilt the present temple adjacent to the mosque.


title: Kashi Vishwanath Temple

text: IIn 1828, Baiza Bai, widow of the Maratha ruler Daulat Rao Scindhia of Gwalior State, built a low-roofed colonnade with over 40 pillars in the Gyan Vapi precinct. During 1833–1840, the boundary of Gyanvapi Well, the ghats and other nearby temples were constructed. Many noble families from various ancestral kingdoms of the Indian subcontinent and their prior establishments make generous contributions for the operations of the temple.


title: Kashi Vishwanath Temple

text: In 1835, Maharaja Ranjit Singh of the Sikh Empire, on the behest of his wife, Maharani Datar Kaur, donated 1 tonne of gold for plating the temple's dome. In 1841, Raghuji Bhonsle III of Nagpur donated silver to the temple. A 7-foot high stone statue of Nandi, gifted by the Rana of Nepal sometime in the 1860s lies to the east of the colonnade.


title: Kashi Vishwanath Temple

text: The temple was managed by a hereditary group of pandits or mahants. After the death of Mahant Devi Dutt, a dispute arose among his successors. In 1900, his brother-in-law Pandit Visheshwar Dayal Tewari filed a lawsuit, which resulted in him being declared the head priest.


title: Kashi Vishwanath Temple

text: The puja of the Maa Shringar Gauri Temple, at the western side of the disputed Gyanvapi Mosque, was restricted after the demolition of the Babri Masjid in December 1992 due to the ensuing deadly riots that followed the demolition of the mosque. In August 2021, five Hindu women petitioned a local court at Varanasi to be allowed to pray at the Maa Shringar Gauri Temple.


title: Kashi Vishwanath Temple

text: In 2019, the Kashi Vishwanath Corridor Project was launched by Narendra Modi to ease access between the temple and the Ganges River, creating a wider space to prevent overcrowding. On 13 December 2021, Modi inaugurated the corridor with a sacred ceremony. A press release by the government said that around 1,400 residents and businesses within the corridor's area were relocated elsewhere and compensated. It also said that more than 40 ruined, centuries-old temples were found and rebuilt, including the Gangeshwar Mahadev temple, the Manokameshwar Mahadev temple, the Jauvinayak temple, and the Shri Kumbha Mahadev temple.


title: Kashi Vishwanath Temple

text: However, many temples were destroyed and relocated from their original places. The original Panchayatna form of the temple was distorted as the four temples of Devi Bhog Annapurna, Sri Lakshmi Narayan, Sri Avimukteshwara Mahadeva and Devi Parvati surrounding the main temple were destroyed during the construction of the Kashi Vishwanath Corridor.


title: Kashi Vishwanath Temple

text: In February 2022, the sanctum sanctorum of the temple was gold-plated after an anonymous donor from South India donated 60 kg of gold to the temple. Flowers from the temple are recycled into incense by the biomaterials startup Phool.co.


title: Kashi Vishwanath Temple

text: The Gyanvapi Mosque complex is a disputed structure that was constructed by the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb over the ruins of the desecrated ancient Kashi Vishwanath Temple after it was defiled several times by Islamic rulers like Qutb al-Din Aibak and Aurangzeb.


title: Kashi Vishwanath Temple

text: Till this day, parts of this ancient temple are clearly visible on the outer walls of the mosque. The statues of the bull Nandi and Maa Shringaar Gauri can be seen even from a distance.


title: Kashi Vishwanath Temple

text: The site has been the centre of a dispute between the Hindu and the Muslim communities over its ownership since 1936.


title: Kashi Vishwanath Temple

text: The temple complex consists of a series of smaller shrines, located in a small lane called the Vishwanatha Galli, near the river. The linga of the main deity at the shrine is tall and in circumference housed in a silver altar. The main temple is quadrangle and is surrounded by shrines of other gods. There are small temples for Kala Bhairava, Kartikeya, Avimukteshwara, Vishnu, Ganesha, Shani, Shiva and Parvati in the complex.


title: Kashi Vishwanath Temple

text: There is a small well in the temple called the "Jnana Vapi" also spelled as "Gyan vapi" (the wisdom well). The Jnana Vapi well sites to the north of the main temple and during the invasion by the Mughals the Jyotirlinga was hidden in the well to protect it at the time of invasion. It is said that the main priest of the temple jumped in the well with the lingam in order to protect the Jyotirlinga from invaders.


title: Kashi Vishwanath Temple

text: There is a Sabha Griha or Congregation Hall leading to the inner Garbha Griha or Sanctum Sanctorum. The venerable Jyotirlinga is a dark brown colored stone which is enshrined in the Sanctum, placed on a silver platform. Structure of the Mandir is composed of three parts. The first compromises a spire on the temple. The second is gold dome and the third is the gold spire atop the sanctum bearing a flag and a trident.


title: Kashi Vishwanath Temple

text: The Kashi Vishwanath temple receives around 3,000 visitors every day. On certain occasions, the numbers reach 1,000,000 and more. Noteworthy about the temple is 15.5-metre-high gold spire and gold Onion dome. There are three domes each made up of pure gold, donated by Maharaja Ranjit Singh in 1835.


title: Kashi Vishwanath Temple

text: The Shri Kashi Vishwanath Dham corridor was constructed between Kashi Vishwanath Temple and Manikarnika Ghat along the Ganges River, providing various amenities for pilgrims.


title: Kashi Vishwanath Temple

text: Located on the banks of the holy Ganges, Varanasi is regarded among the holiest of the Hindu cities. The Kashi Vishwanath temple is widely recognized as one of the most important places of worship in the Hindu religion. Inside the Kashi Vishwanath Temple is the Jyotirlinga of Shiva, Vishveshvara or Vishvanath. The Vishveshvara Jyotirlinga has a very special and unique significance in the spiritual history of India.


title: Kashi Vishwanath Temple

text: Many leading saints, including Adi Sankaracharya, Ramakrishna Paramhansa, Swami Vivekananda, Bamakhyapa, Goswami Tulsidas, Swami Dayananda Saraswati, Sathya Sai Baba, Yogiji Maharaj, Pramukh Swami Maharaj, Mahant Swami Maharaj and Gurunanak have visited the site. A visit to the temple and a bath in the river Ganges is one of many methods believed to lead one on a path to Moksha (liberation). Thus, Hindus from all over the world try to visit the place at least once in their lifetime. There is also a tradition that one should give up at least one desire after a pilgrimage the temple, and the pilgrimage would also include a visit to the temple at Rameswaram in Tamil Nadu in Southern India, where people take water samples of the Ganges to perform prayer at the temple and bring back sand from near that temple. Because of the immense popularity and holiness of Kashi Vishwanath temple, hundreds of temples across India have been built in the same architectural style. Many legends record that the true devotee achieves freedom from death and saṃsāra by the worship of Shiva, Shiva's devotees on death being directly taken to his abode on Mount Kailash by his messengers and not to Yama. The superiority of Shiva and his victory over his own nature—Shiva is himself identified with death—is also stated. There is a popular belief that Shiva himself blows the mantra of salvation into the ears of people who die naturally at the Vishwanath temple.


title: Kashi Vishwanath Temple

text: Phalgun Shukla Ekadashi is celebrated as Rangabhari Ekadashi, that is, colors. According to tradition, before Holi, Baba Vishwanath comes back to Kashi after having a cow in the form of mother Bhagwati. The temple complex is echoed by the echo of dozens of Damroos. This tradition has been performed for over 200 years. On Basant Panchami Baba's Tilak is performed, Shivaratri marriage and Rangbhari Ekadashi marks parvati leaving with shiva. These traditions are carried out by the erstwhile Mahant family of the temple for over a century.


title: Kashi Vishwanath Temple

text: These rituals of Baba's marriage ceremony are performed at the residence of Kulpati Tiwari, the erstwhile Mahant of Shri Kashi Vishwanath Temple in Redzone. The seven rituals of Saptarishi Aarti were performed by Baba Vishwanath. According to the Puranas, Kashi is loved by the Saptarishi to the priest, so according to the tradition, the devotees of the Saptarishi Aarti perform the rituals of marriage. The seven archaks under the leadership of Pradhan Archak Pandit Shashibhushan Tripathi (Guddu Maharaj) completed the marriage in Vedic rituals. "Mangala Aarti" is performed at 3:30 am, "Bhog Aarti" at 12:00 pm, "Saptarishi Aaarti" at 7:30 pm and "Shringar Aaarti" at 11:00 pm.


title: Kashi Vishwanath Temple

text: Yadav community of Kashi associated with "Chandravanshi Gop Seva Samiti" and "Shree Krishna Yadav Mahasabha" have been performing "jalabhishek" on shivling traditionally since 90 years, first started in 1932.


title: Boeing 717

text: The Boeing 717 is an American five-abreast single-aisle airliner produced by Boeing Commercial Airplanes. The twin-engine airliner was developed for the 100-seat market and originally marketed by McDonnell Douglas as the MD-95. It was a shortened derivative of the company's successful airliner, the MD-80, and thus the third generation of the DC-9 family. Capable of seating up to 134 passengers, the 717 has a design range of . It is powered by two Rolls-Royce BR715 turbofan engines mounted at the rear of the fuselage.


title: Boeing 717

text: The first order for the airliner was placed with McDonnell Douglas in October 1995 by ValuJet Airlines (later AirTran Airways). With McDonnell Douglas and Boeing merging in 1997 prior to production, the airliner entered service in 1999 as the "Boeing 717". Production of the type ceased in May 2006 after 155 were delivered. , 103 Boeing 717 airliners remain in service and have recorded zero fatalities and no hull losses.


title: Boeing 717

text: Douglas Aircraft launched the DC-9, a short-range companion to its larger four-engine DC-8, in 1963. The DC-9 was an all-new design, using two rear fuselage-mounted Pratt & Whitney JT8D turbofan engines; a small, efficient wing; and a T-tail. The DC-9's maiden flight was in 1965 and entered airline service later that year. When production ended in 1982, a total of 976 DC-9s had been produced.


title: Boeing 717

text: The McDonnell Douglas MD-80 series, the second generation of the DC-9, began airline service in 1980. It was a lengthened DC-9-50 with a higher maximum take-off weight (MTOW) and higher fuel capacity, as well as next-generation Pratt and Whitney JT8D-200 series engines and an improved wing design. 1,191 MD-80s were delivered from 1980 to 1999.


title: Boeing 717

text: The MD-90 was developed from the MD-80 series. It was launched in 1989 and first flew in 1993. The MD-90 was longer and featured a glass cockpit (electronic instrumentation) and more powerful, quieter, fuel-efficient IAE V2525-D5 engines, with the option of upgrading to an IAE V2528 engine. A total of 116 MD-90 airliners were delivered.


title: Boeing 717

text: The MD-95 traces its history back to 1983 when McDonnell Douglas outlined a study named the "DC-9-90". During the early 1980s, as production of the DC-9 family moved away from the smaller Series 30 towards the larger Super 80 (later redesignated MD-80) variants, McDonnell Douglas proposed a smaller version of the DC-9 to fill the gap left by the DC-9-30. Dubbed the DC-9-90, it was revealed in February 1983 and was to be some shorter than the DC-9-81, giving it an overall length of . The aircraft was proposed with a thrust version of the JT8D-200 series engine, although the CFM International CFM56-3 was also considered. Seating up to 117 passengers, the DC-9-90 was to be equipped with the DC-9's wing with tip extensions, rather than the more heavily modified increased area of the MD-80. The aircraft had a design range of , with an option to increase to , and a gross weight of .


title: Boeing 717

text: The DC-9-90 was designed to meet the needs of the newly deregulated American airline industry. However, its development was postponed by the recession of the early 1980s. When McDonnell Douglas did develop a smaller version of the MD-80, it simply shrunk the aircraft to create the MD-87, rather than offer a lower thrust, lighter aircraft that was more comparable to the DC-9-30. With its relatively high MTOW and powerful engines, the MD-87 essentially became a special mission aircraft and could not compete with the all new 100-seaters then being developed. Although an excellent aircraft for specialized roles, the MD-87 often was not sold on its own. Relying on its commonality factor, sales were generally limited to existing MD-80 operators.


title: Boeing 717

text: In 1991, McDonnell Douglas revealed that it was again considering developing a specialized 100-seat version of the MD-80, initially named the "MD-87-105" (105 seats). It was to be some shorter than the MD-87, powered with engines in the thrust class. McDonnell Douglas, Pratt & Whitney, and the China National Aero-Technology Import Export Agency signed a memorandum of understanding to develop a 105-seat version of the MD-80. At the 1991 Paris Airshow, McDonnell Douglas announced the development of a 105-seat aircraft, designated "MD-95". The new name was selected to reflect the anticipated year deliveries would begin. McDonnell Douglas first offered the MD-95 for sale in 1994.


title: Boeing 717

text: In early 1994, the MD-95 re-emerged as similar to the DC-9-30, its specified weight, dimensions, and fuel capacity being almost identical. Major changes included a fuselage "shrink" back to length (same as the DC-9-30), and the reversion to the original DC-9 wingspan of . At this time, McDonnell Douglas said that it expected the MD-95 to become a family of aircraft with the capability of increased range and seating capacity. The MD-95 was developed to satisfy the market need to replace early DC-9s, then approaching 30 years old. The MD-95 was a complete overhaul, going back to the original DC-9-30 design and applying new engines, cockpit and other more modern systems.


title: Boeing 717

text: In March 1995, longtime McDonnell Douglas customer Scandinavian Airlines System (SAS) chose the Boeing 737-600 for its 100-seater over the MD-95. In October 1995, U.S. new entrant and low-cost carrier ValuJet signed an order for 50 MD-95s, plus 50 options. McDonnell Douglas president Harry Stonecipher felt that launching MD-95 production on the basis of this single order held little risk, stating that further orders would "take a while longer". The ValuJet order was the only order received for some two years.


title: Boeing 717

text: As first proposed, the MD-95 was to be powered by a thrust derivative of the JT8D-200 series with the Rolls-Royce Tay 670 also considered as an alternative. This was confirmed in January 1992, when Rolls-Royce and McDonnell Douglas signed a memorandum of understanding concerning the Tay-powered MD-95. McDonnell Douglas said that the MD-95 project would cost only a minimal amount to develop, as it was a direct offshoot of the IAE-powered MD-90.


title: Boeing 717

text: During 1993 McDonnell Douglas seemed to be favoring a life extension program of the DC-9-30, under the program name DC-9X, to continue its presence in the 100-120 seat market, rather than concentrating on the new build MD-95. In its evaluation of the engine upgrades available for the DC-9X, McDonnell Douglas found that the BMW Rolls-Royce BR700 engine to be the ideal candidate, and on February 23, 1994, the BR700 was selected as the sole powerplant for the airliner.


title: Boeing 717

text: McDonnell Douglas was planning for MD-95 final assembly to be undertaken in China, as an offshoot of the Trunkliner program, for which McDonnell Douglas had been negotiating to have up to 150 MD-90s built in China. The MD-90 Trunkliner deal was finalized in June 1992, but the contract was for a total of 40 aircraft, including 20 MD-80Ts and 20 -90Ts. The MD-80 has been license built in Shanghai since the 1980s. However, in early 1993, MDC said that it was considering sites outside China, and was later seeking alternative locations for the assembly line. In 1994, McDonnell Douglas sought global partners to share development costs. It also began a search for a low-cost final assembly site. Halla Group in South Korea was selected to make the wings; Alenia of Italy the entire fuselage; Aerospace Industrial Development Corp. of Taiwan, the tail; ShinMaywa of Japan, the horizontal stabilizer; and a manufacturing division of Korean Air Lines, the nose and cockpit.


title: Boeing 717

text: On November 8, 1994, McDonnell Douglas announced that final assembly would be taken away from the longtime Douglas plant at Long Beach Airport, California. Instead, it selected a modifications and maintenance operation, Dalfort Aviation in Dallas, Texas, to assemble the MD-95. In early 1995, management and unions in Long Beach reached an agreement to hold down wage costs for the life of the MD-95 program and McDonnell Douglas canceled the preliminary agreement with Dalfort.


title: Boeing 717

text: After McDonnell Douglas was acquired by Boeing in August 1997, most industry observers expected that Boeing would cancel development of the MD-95. However, Boeing decided to go forward with the design under a new name, Boeing 717. While it appeared that Boeing had skipped the 717 model designation when the 720 and the 727 followed the 707, the 717 name was the company's model number for the C-135 Stratolifter military transport and KC-135 Stratotanker tanker aircraft. 717 had also been used to promote an early design of the 720 to airlines before it was modified to meet market demands. A Boeing historian notes that the Air Force tanker was designated "717-100" and the commercial airliner designated "717-200". The lack of a widespread use of the 717 name left it available for rebranding the MD-95.


title: Boeing 717

text: At first Boeing had no more success selling the 717 than McDonnell Douglas. Even the original order for 50 was no certainty in the chaotic post-deregulation United States airline market. Assembly started on the first 717 in May 1997. The aircraft had its roll out ceremony on June 10, 1998. The 717's first flight took place on September 2, 1998. Following flight testing, the airliner was awarded a type certification on September 1, 1999. Its first delivery was in September 1999 to AirTran Airways, which Valujet was now called. Commercial service began the following month. Trans World Airlines (TWA) ordered 50 717s in 1998 with an option for 50 additional aircraft.


title: Boeing 717

text: Boeing's decision to go ahead with the 717 slowly began to pay off. Early 717 operators were delighted with the reliability and passenger appeal of the type and decided to order more. The small Australian regional airline Impulse took a long-term lease on five 717s in early 2000 to begin an expansion into mainline routes. The ambitious move could not be sustained in competition with the majors, and Impulse sold out to Qantas in May 2001.


title: Boeing 717

text: Within a few months, the 717's abilities became clear to Qantas, being faster than the BAe 146, and achieving a higher dispatch reliability, over 99%, than competing aircraft. Maintenance costs are low: according to AirTran Airways, a C check inspection, for example, takes three days and is required once every 4,500 flying hours. (For comparison, its predecessor, the DC-9 needed 21 days for a C check.) The new Rolls-Royce BR715 engine design is relatively easy to maintain. Many 717 operators, such as Qantas, became converts to the plane; Qantas bought more 717s to replace its BAe 146 fleet, and other orders came from Hawaiian Airlines and Midwest Airlines.


title: Boeing 717

text: Boeing actively marketed the 717 to a number of large airlines, including Northwest Airlines, who already operated a large fleet of DC-9 aircraft, and Lufthansa. Boeing also studied a stretched, higher-capacity version of the 717, to have been called 717-300, but decided against proceeding with the new model, fearing that it would encroach on the company's 737-700 model. Production of the original 717 continued. Boeing continued to believe that the 100-passenger market would be lucrative enough to support both the 717 and the 737-600, the smallest of the Next-Generation 737 series. While the aircraft were similar in overall size, the 737-600 was better suited to long-distance routes, while the lighter 717 was more efficient on shorter, regional routes.


title: Boeing 717

text: In 2001, Boeing began implementing a moving assembly line for production of the 717 and 737. The moving line greatly reduced production time, which led to lower production costs. Following the slump in airline traffic caused by an economic downturn subsequent to the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, Boeing announced a review of the type's future. After much deliberation, it was decided to continue with production. Despite the lack of orders, Boeing had confidence in the 717's fundamental suitability to the 100-seat market, and in the long-term size of that market. After 19 worldwide 717 sales in 2000, and just 6 in 2001, Boeing took 32 orders for the 717 in 2002, despite the severe industry downturn. The 100th 717 was delivered to AirTran Airways on June 18, 2002.


title: Boeing 717

text: Increased competition from regional jets manufactured by Bombardier and Embraer took a heavy toll on sales during the airline slump after 2001. American Airlines acquired TWA and initially planned to continue the 717 order. American Airlines canceled TWA's order for Airbus A318s, but eventually also canceled the Boeing 717s that had not yet been delivered. The beginning of the end came in December 2003 when Boeing failed to reach a US$2.7 billion contract from Air Canada, a long term DC-9 customer, who chose the Embraer E-Jets and Bombardier CRJ200 over the 717. In January 2005, citing slow sales, Boeing announced that it planned to end production of the 717 after it had met all of its outstanding orders.


title: Boeing 717

text: The 156th and final 717 rolled off the assembly line in April 2006 for AirTran Airways, which was the 717's launch customer as well as its final customer. The final two Boeing 717s were delivered to customers AirTran Airways and Midwest Airlines on May 23, 2006. The 717 was the last commercial airplane produced at Boeing's Long Beach facility in Southern California.


title: Boeing 717

text: The 717 features a two-crew glass cockpit that incorporates six interchangeable liquid-crystal-display units and advanced Honeywell VIA 2000 computers. The cockpit design is called Advanced Common Flightdeck (ACF) and is shared with the MD-10 and MD-11. Flight deck features include an Electronic Instrument System, a dual Flight Management System, a Central Fault Display System, and Global Positioning System. Category IIIb automatic landing capability for bad-weather operations and Future Air Navigation Systems are available. The 717 shares the same type rating as the DC-9, such that the FAA approved transition courses for DC-9 and analog MD-80 pilots could be completed in 11 days.


title: Boeing 717

text: In conjunction with Parker Hannifin, MPC Products of Skokie, Illinois designed a fly-by-wire technology mechanical control suite for the 717 flight deck. The modules replaced much cumbersome rigging that had occurred in previous DC-9/MD-80 aircraft. The Rolls-Royce BR715 engines are completely controlled by an electronic engine system (Full Authority Digital Engine Control — FADEC) developed by BAE Systems, offering improved controllability and optimization. The engine has significantly lower fuel consumption compared to other engines of the equivalent amount of thrust.


title: Boeing 717

text: Like its DC-9/MD-80/MD-90 predecessors, the 717 has a 2+3 seating arrangement in the main economy class, providing only one middle seat per row, whereas other single-aisle twin jets, such as the Boeing 737 family and the Airbus A320 family, often have 3+3 arrangement with two middle seats per row. Unlike its predecessors, McDonnell Douglas decided not to offer the MD-95/717 with the boarding flexibility of aft airstairs, with the goal of maximizing fuel efficiency through the reduction and simplification of as much auxiliary equipment as possible.


title: Boeing 717

text: , there were 103 Boeing 717s in service with Delta Air Lines (64), QantasLink (20), and Hawaiian Airlines (19), down from 148 aircraft in 2018.


title: Boeing 717

text: Delta Air Lines is currently the largest operator of the 717, flying nearly 60 percent of all in-service jets, but did not purchase any of the planes new from Boeing. In 2013, Delta began leasing the entire fleet of 88 jets previously operated by AirTran Airways from Southwest Airlines, who had purchased AirTran, but wanted to preserve its all-Boeing 737 fleet rather than taking on another class of aircraft. For Delta, used Boeing 717 and MD-90s allowed them to retire their DC-9s while also being cheaper to acquire than buying brand-new jets from Airbus or Boeing. Unlike other mainline US legacy carriers, Delta has decided that its best path to profitability is a strategy that utilizes older aircraft, and Delta has created a very extensive MRO (maintenance, repair and overhaul) organization, called TechOps, to support them.


title: Boeing 717

text: In 2015, Blue1 announced it would sell its 717 fleet, with five jets going to Delta and four going to the then third largest operator of the type, Volotea, a Spanish low-cost carrier.


title: Boeing 717

text: In January 2021, Volotea retired their last of formerly 19 Boeing 717s. It was the last remaining European operator of the type.


title: Boeing 717

text: , the Boeing 717 has been involved in five aviation accidents and incidents but with no hull-losses and no fatalities. The major incidents included one on-ground collision while taxiing, an emergency landing where the nose landing gear did not extend, and one attempted hijacking.


title: Flag of Nazi Germany

text: The flag of Nazi Germany, officially the flag of the German Reich, featured a red background with a black swastika on a white disc. This flag came into use initially as the banner of the Nazi Party (NSDAP) after its foundation. Following the appointment of Adolf Hitler as Chancellor in 1933, this flag was adopted as one of the nation's dual national flags, the other being the black-white-red triband of the German Empire.


title: Flag of Nazi Germany

text: This dual flag arrangement ended on 15 September 1935, one year after the death of Reich President Paul von Hindenburg, and the Nazi flag became the only national flag of Germany. One reason for the change may have been the ""Bremen" incident" of 26 July 1935, in which a group of demonstrators in New York City boarded the ocean liner SS "Bremen", tore the Nazi Party flag from the jackstaff, and tossed it into the Hudson River. When the German ambassador protested, US officials responded that the German national flag had not been harmed, only a political party symbol. The new flag law was announced at the annual party rally in Nuremberg in 1935, where Hermann Göring claimed the old black-white-red flag, while honoured, was the symbol of a bygone era and under threat of being used by "reactionaries".


title: Flag of Nazi Germany

text: After rejecting many suggestions and colors, the process of choosing a new flag was described by Hitler as follows:


title: Flag of Nazi Germany

text: After Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany on 30 January 1933, the black-red-gold tricolour flag was discarded; a ruling on 12 March established two legal national flags: the reintroduced black-white-red imperial tricolour and the flag of the Nazi Party.


title: Flag of Nazi Germany

text: Nazi ensigns had a through and through image, so the "left-facing" and "right-facing" version were each present on one side. However, the Nazi flag on land was right-facing on both sides.


title: Flag of Nazi Germany

text: Albert Speer, in his book "Inside the Third Reich", stated that: "in only two other designs did he (Adolf Hitler) execute the same care as he did his Obersalzberg house: that of the Reich War Flag and his own standard of Chief of State", showing that Hitler was an avid vexillographer (flag designer).


title: Flag of Nazi Germany

text: An off-centred disk version of the swastika flag was used as the civil ensign on German-registered civilian ships and was used as the Jack on Kriegsmarine warships. There is debate as to whether the off-centred disk flag was the official national flag from 1935 to 1945, such as at the popular vexillogy site, Flags of the World. The centred-disk flag was commonly used by civilians and the German armed forces aside from the navy.