Emily Dix

Emily Dix (21 May 1904 – 1972) was a famous palaeobotanist.

She was born into a farming family on the Gower Peninsula. At age 18 she won a scholarship to University College Swansea where she graduated in 1925 with a first class honours degree in geology.

She then went on to study with Arthur Trueman, with whom she worked for the next five years on various projects. In 1930, she was appointed lecturer in geology at Bedford College in London, where she stayed for the rest of her working life.

Her initial work, following that of Truman, was on non-marine bivalves in the South Wales Coalfield. This remained an interest throughout her working life.

Dix's major contribution was to apply Trueman's approach to biostratigraphy to the floras.

World war II came at the height of her career, and disrupted her scientific activities. Along with the rest of Bedford College, she was evacuated to Cambridge, leaving behind her collections of fossils and scientific reprints which was later lost through bombing.

Most of her fossils survived and her collection is now divided between the Hunterian Museum in Glasgow, and the National Museum of Wales, and the Sedgwick Museum in Cambridge. Dix's wartime papers were mainly on relatively minor aspects of coal geology (e.g. the presence of boulders in coal seams) and plant biostratigraphy is rarely mentioned.

Towards the end of the war, Dix suffered a mental breakdown which caused the end of her scientific career.

By 1946, her condition had so deteriorated that her sister Margaret had taken over her affairs, and moved Emily to The Retreat mental hospital in York, where she remained until her death.