Minds that contribute diverse knowledge and visions to the soil’s preservation so that it maintains its properties and ecosystem benefits over time: minds capable of making soil’s sustainable use. In the same sense, now more than ever, soil science faces problems that come from complex causes and require interdisciplinary equally complex solutions, meaning that it requires minds with different perspectives, different skills, and different life histories.

As a group endeavor, science can only be as good and innovative as the sum of its individuals’ brilliance, because of this, science needs to ensure it has the largest pool of individuals to choose from. Science today must include all that a human can be, and this means both to include the under-represented and the represented. While this is important, it can result in reducing the topic to a game of numbers and quotas, but individuals are not numbers. Over the last decades, diversity in science has focused on the inclusion of individuals from formerly under-represented backgrounds. Although McGlamery published relatively little, she had a great influence on Alabama paleontology and biostratigraphy in her long association with the Geological Survey of Alabama. Her advice on fossils and localities was sought by many researchers. She also gained extensive field experience, particularly with Coastal Plain mollusks, and was active in local scientific societies. “Miss Winnie” spent much of her career studying Foraminifera, especially after the first successful Alabama oil fields were brought in (notably, the Gilbertown field in 1944 and the Citronelle field in 1955). McGlamery was trained in paleontology at the Johns Hopkins University at a time when few women scientists worked in the field, though microscope work was tolerated.

She was a diminutive but feisty woman who arguably did more for the discovery of oil and gas fields than any other state employee during that time, for she logged the cores and cuttings of nearly every permitted well for the Survey’s public files.

During her three decades with the Geological Survey of Alabama from 1931 to 1961, Winnie McGlamery (1887–1977) was a key figure in Alabama paleontology and oil and gas exploration.

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