Mary Leakey was a paleoanthropologist who made several prominent archaeological and anthropological discoveries throughout the latter half of the 20th century. She worked with her husband, Louis Leakey, and uncovered a number of fossils in Africa, which significantly advanced scientific knowledge of the origins of humankind. Some of her notable discoveries include:

• Proconsul africanus: In 1948, she found a partial skull fossil of Proconsul africanus, an ancestor of apes and humans that later evolved into the great apes.

• Zinjanthropus boisei: In 1959, Mary Leakey discovered a hominid skull (which she reconstructed from hundreds of fragments) that her husband named Zinjanthropus boisei (later reclassified as a form of Australopithecus) .

• Laetoli footprints: In 1978, she discovered at Laetoli, a site south of Olduvai Gorge, several sets of footprints made in volcanic ash by early hominins that lived about 3.5 million years ago. The footprints indicated that their makers walked upright; this discovery pushed back the advent of human bipedalism to a date earlier than the scientific community had previously thought.

• Hominin fossils: At the Laetoli site, she discovered hominin fossils that were more than 3.75 million years old.

• Stone tools: Mary Leakey developed a system for classifying the stone tools found at Olduvai and discovered tools as old as two million years.

Mary Leakey continued working after her husbands death and became a respected figure in paleoanthropology in her own right. She died in Kenya in 1996.