Statue of fossil-hunting pioneer Mary Anning to be unveiled in Dorset

A nine-year-old pointed out what was missing in Lyme Regis. Her long campaign has now borne fruit

It all began with a curious nine-year-old and a question that she asked her mother. Where in their hometown of Lyme Regis was the statue of Mary Anning, the pioneering Victorian fossil hunter who, she had recently discovered, had lived and worked there?

There wasn't one, Anya Pearson was forced to tell her indignant daughter. Anning's lifetime of discoveries - including finding the first ichthyosaur skeleton at the age of just 12 - may have profoundly shaped the emerging science of palaeontology, but in her own Dorset town and farther afield, she had been largely forgotten.