Welcome to Erin Mankie's Cabinet of Curiosity's, a production of I Heart Radio and Grimm

and Mild.

Our world is full of the unexplainable.

And if history is an open book, all of these amazing tales are right there on display,

just waiting for us to explore.

Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosity's.

When you grow up on the Jurassic Coast, it seems written in the stars that you'll be spending

your life among the bones of dinosaurs.

Mary was born in just such a place, and while she was raised in a time of conflict with the

war between Napoleon and the British raging and her own family full of poor Protestant

dissenters, she still found

time to dig.

Thanks in part to her father, a cabinet maker and amateur fossil collector who needed a

sidekick.

While most women her age were being raised to be delicate wives to future husbands, Mary

was learning proper fossil cleaning techniques from her father as they dug along the beach

for relics to sell alongside his cabinetry.

However, when he died suddenly of tuberculosis in 1810, those fossils became a means of helping

meet her family's needs.

It didn't take long for Mary to strike gold, or strike bone, I guess.

While digging with her brother Joseph the two happened upon a skull.

Joseph left Mary to unearth the rest of the fossil, and through a painstakingly long process

...