A short biography of a pioneering scientist from Lyme Regis has been made public for the very first time.

The biography of Mary Anning, written in the final 10 years of her life, was penned by George Roberts, who ran a private school opposite Anning’s fossil shop in the west Dorset town.

Dr Michael Taylor of National Museums Scotland and University of Leicester and Professor Michael Benton of Bristol’s School of Earth Sciences have published the work, which was preserved in the Special Collections of the University of Bristol Library.

Anning, who died of breast cancer at the age of 48 in 1847, has experienced a recent surge in popularity as the subject of books and films, among them Tracy Chevalier’s Remarkable Creatures, and Ammonite, in which she was portrayed by Kate Winslet.

A statue in Lyme Regis dedicated to Anning's memory was unveiled last year following a long campaign led by schoolgirl Evie Swire. 

Dr Taylor said George Roberts met Mary Anning many times.

He said: "He describes how she was struck by lightning as a baby, and then how at the age of about ten she began collecting fossils, and how she sold her first find, an ammonite to a passing lady in the street for half a crown.”

There are further details of Anning's discoveries of fossil reptiles, including the first ichthyosaur fossil studied by scientists. 

The memoir is 'valuable', Prof Benton said, becuase although Anning was widely known to natural scientists in London, Bristol, Oxford, and Cambridge, people in Lyme would not 'enquire into her life in any detail'.

“We dated the manuscript as written some time in 1837–47,” added Dr Taylor, “because there is an ‘1837’ watermark in the paper, and Anning was described as a ‘living worthy’.

"Later, Roberts took the manuscript, deleted mention of Anning as alive, and added information on her death to make it into an obituary, presumably just after she died. But it seems never to have been published at its full length.”

Prof Benton concluded: “We are very pleased that we are able to publish the document in full.

“In the paper, we show detailed photographs of all four pages of the document, as well as our reading of the various versions and modifications.

"George Roberts was the locally-based author who reported the news from Lyme Regis to various newspapers and wrote his own books, so it makes complete sense that he would have written about Mary Anning as a well-known celebrity of the town.”

The academics' paper can be read in the Journal of the Geological Society and the memoir by George Roberts (DM Ref SCUBL DM1186/5/1) is in the collection of books and manuscripts in the history of geology made by Joan M. Eyles (1907–1986) and Victor A. Eyles (1895–1978) and donated by Joan Eyles to the University of Bristol Library.