But normally they would not enquire into her life in any detail. 'One or two visitors to Lyme Regis mentioned Mary Anning and her little fossil shop, and she was obviously widely known to natural scientists in London, Bristol, Oxford, and Cambridge. 'This memoir is valuable,' said Prof Benton. It looks as if it was written as a dictionary entry or a section for a future book.'

So, it wasn't just someone else copying from his book. We were able to confirm Anning expert Hugh Torrens's suggestion that it was by Roberts, by identifying Roberts's handwriting, and comparing the corrections and even a mistake with a particular date which Roberts had handwritten into his own copy of his history. 'Roberts wrote books like 'The Beauties of Lyme Regis' for tourists, and he collected interesting pieces of information. 'When the Library sent me a copy of the four-page manuscript, I found that it was based partly on a passage in Roberts's history of Lyme Regis,' said Dr. But, in her day, she was a curiosity, another poor person in the Regency seaside resort of Lyme Regis. Mary Anning has become an icon of the often-forgotten contributions of women to science, and the campaign to get children, especially girls, interested in geology. Noted professors relied on her work to provide insights into the life of the past. She collected some of the first marine reptiles-ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs-from the Jurassic period of the Dorset coast. Mary Anning (1799–1847) of Lyme Regis has been the subject of recent books and films, such as Tracy Chevalier's Remarkable Creatures, and Ammonite, in which she was portrayed by Kate Winslet, because of her importance in the early days of palaeontology. Michael Taylor of National Museums Scotland and University of Leicester and Professor Michael Benton of Bristol's School of Earth Sciences.

Penned by George Roberts (1804–1860), who ran a private school opposite Anning's fossil shop in Lyme Regis, and preserved in the Special Collections of the University of Bristol Library, the work has been published by Dr.

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