Mary Leakey (6 February 1913 – 9 December 1996) was a British
paleoanthropologist who discovered the first fossilised
Proconsul skull, an extinct ape now believed to be ancestral to humans. She also discovered the robust
Zinjanthropus skull at
Olduvai Gorge in
Tanzania, eastern Africa. For much of her career she worked with her husband,
Louis Leakey, at Olduvai Gorge, where they uncovered fossils of ancient
hominines and the earliest
hominins, as well as the stone tools produced by the latter group. Mary Leakey developed a system for
classifying the stone tools found at Olduvai. She discovered the Laetoli footprints, and at the Laetoli site she discovered hominin fossils that were more than 3.75 million years old.