IN recent years, Mary Anning, the remarkable fossil hunter of Lyme Regis, has been celebrated in print, on stage and on screen – even as a prototype lesbian. But the character remains both enduringly fascinating and slightly elusive. Now a new one-woman play, coming to Dorchester Arts at the Corn Exchange on Thursday 14th May and the Mowlem at Swanage on Friday 15th, sets out to show the woman behind the myth.

Fossil Mary, written and performed by Elizabeth Blake, tells the story of the woman born in abject poverty in Lyme Regis in 1799, who became a pioneering palaeontologist and the world’s greatest fossil hunter. Known as “the lightning girl” after surviving a lightning strike as a baby, Mary found her first dinosaur fossil at the age of 12.

Looking back at the years when famous men came to buy her fossils and enrich themselves with her unique expertise, Mary Anning said: “These learned men have sucked my brains.” Ignored in her time, celebrated in ours, this new play gives Mary the spotlight she deserves.

Her incredible discoveries revolutionised the way people thought about the evolution of life on earth but because she was a poor, working class woman she was spurned and patronised by the men of science who took the credit for her extraordinary work.

In 2010, the Royal Society recognised her as one of the ten most influential female scientists and her finds, now attributed to her, can be seen in museums around the world. She has even made it to Mars – NASA named one of its drilling sites after her as, like Mary, it revealed details of an ancient environment.