User:Hillbillyholiday/Articles/Elizabeth Gray (biologist)

Elizabeth Gray (1831-1924) was a Scottish malacologist.

youngest daughter of Thomas and Mary Anderson, was born in the Burns Arms Inn, Alloway, then in 1836 moved to Girvan when her father gave up innkeeping to become a farmer.. attended a small private school in Girvan until the age of 15 years, when she was sent to a boarding school in Glasgow, returning thereafter to the farmhouse home at Enoch.[ Loch_Enoch? ] Her father, Thomas Anderson, took a keen interest in the fossils of the area, for instance by collecting those exposed in the local road stone quarries. In a paper by academic geologists Nicholson and Etheridge (1879), a trilobite - Bronteus andersoni - was dedicated by them ‘to this intelligent and enthusiastic collector’, and they later named a coral after him.

There are several earlier references in the proceedings to Elizabeth Gray and to Hannah Robertson - though invariably as 'Mrs Robert Gray' and 'Mrs David Robertosn' respectively. Both Elizabeth Gray and Hannah Robertson wre made honorary members of the Society (Natural History Society of Glasgow) in 1901.

Elizabeth Gray (née Anderson) marriage in 1856 to Robert Gray one of the founding members of NHSG.

Provided specimens for display at meetings.

A graptolite she found, proposed named Cyrtograpsus grayiarus in her honour. 1872

Most of her collection is now in the Natural History Museum, London, some in Hunterian Museum, Glasgow and elsewhere.

E&R moved to Edinburgh in 1874

Women first admitted as members of NHSG eight years later,

Professor Young instituted a class in geology for women, her only formal geological education. Appears she acquired her initial knowledge through fossil-collecting expeditions with her father (McCance 2002).

ODNB 2009 states 1900 "made an honorary member of Geological Society of Glasgow for the contributions she had made to geological literature. The Murchison geological fund as awarded to her in 1903 in recognition of her skilful services to geological science. A woman of considerable character, determination, and resourcefulness, with a phenomenally retentive memory, she was renowned for her extensive collecting in the Girvan district, which she carried on until the autumn of 1923"

Fellow of the Royal Physical Society Edinburgh. She was great friends with geologist Charles Lapworth and the fossil collector Jane Donald Longstaff.

..fossils from the Ordovician and Silurian rocks of the Girvan area of Ayrshire. Most of her collection was purchased by the Natural History Museum in London in 1920-1, just a couple of years before she died.

She made an important contribution to Scottish geology and is regarded as one of the foremost Scottish fossil collectors. She had two daughters Alice and Edith, who carried on her work after her death. Alice and Edith sold further collections of fossils to the Natural History Museum in 1937 and 1947.

Mrs Gray died of acute bronchitis on 11th February 1924, just a few weeks short of her 93rd birthday. She is commemorated in the names of the many Palaeozoic fossils that bear her name or of one of the localities of the Girvan area, and by the observation that for anyone wanting to work on the faunas of the Ordovician period the Gray Collection remains required study.

The first Gray Collection was presented to the Hunterian Museum in 1866.

The Gray Collection of Fossils has a particular value because their exact geographical localtion and horizon and associations have been recorded. They are the basis for many early descriptive papers and monographs, and many are British Fossil Type Specimens.

Further

• Creese, Mary R. S. (1998). Ladies in the laboratory?: American and British women in science, 1800-1900 : A survey of their contributions to research. p. 291. ISBN 9780810832879.

References

[[Category:Malacologists]]