Elizabeth Gray

Elizabeth Gray (born Elizabeth Anderson; 21 February 1831 – 11 February 1924) was a Scottish early fossil collector. Gray created scientifically organised collections of fossils for several museums.

Life Elizabeth Anderson was born in Alloway in 1831. She and her family moved to Enoch near Girvan in Ayrshire where they farmed and Elizabeth attended a small private school. Her father was described as an enthusiastic collector of fossils who had a type of trilobite named after him. Anderson was sent to a boarding school in Glasgow when she was fifteen. She stayed for a year

Marriage (and holidays in Girvan) She married Robert Gray on 8 April 1856 and they both shared an interest in collecting fossils each holiday back in Girvan. She was assisted by their children when they were able. They lived in Glasgow, where Robert worked in a bank, and their holidays were spent back in Ayrshire. Elizabeth's interest lay in documenting and discovering fossils and she trained her children to document their findings too. However, in 1866 the first Gray collection was given to the Hunterian Museum in Glasgow by the two of them. and a strong supporter for women's higher education. He ran classes for women

From 1874 they were able to use the expertise of the palaeontologists of Edinburgh as the family moved to follow Robert's new job. The Ordovician fossils were described and classified. Robert died in 1887.

Further collaboration Elizabeth Gray's work was drawn upon by many publications, such as Charles Lapworth's Girvan Succession of 1882. Lapworth noted her work's significance as "the very first collection in which the exact localities and horizons of every individual fossil...[were] written down at the time of collection." Elizabeth was offered the chance to learn how to scientifically describe her own finds by Doctor Ramsay Traquair of the Royal Scottish Museum, but she wanted to concentrate on curating specimens for others to study as she felt that those she sent fossils to had more specific taxonomic expertise and she wanted the best minds to work on her collections. The ODNB notes that Gray was "a woman of considerable character, determination, and resourcefulness, with a phenomenally retentive memory." and died in Edinburgh in 1924.