One of Lyme Regis’ favourite daughters is being celebrated with a rarely-seen portrait of renowned palaeontologist Mary Anning.

Lyme Regis Museum, which stands on Mary’s former home on the seafront, is also holding an exhibition featuring one of her rare ichthyosaurus and a newly-discovered genus and special of extinct marine ‘crocodile’ found by two fossil hunters.

Museum Director, Bridget Houseago, says: “We are delighted to bring Mary’s portrait and one of her famous ichthyosaurs back to Lyme Regis.

“It is a wonderful way to mark Mary’s birthday, the end of our centenary year, and to celebrate Lyme’s pioneering fossil hunter.

“We are delighted to have these precious objects on loan, and we hope our visitors will enjoy seeing them.

“It is thought the portrait was a commission, which was then bought by a collector and donated to the Geological Society in Piccadilly, London, in 1875, where it has hung ever since.

“The irony was that Mary was not allowed to be a member of the society, because she was a woman, but they obviously valued her work and expertise, because her portrait has hung there for all this time – the only female in a pantheon of famous fathers of science.”

Mary’s portrait is on loan from the Geological Society and is on public display in Lyme Regis for the first time. Painted in pastels, it is the work of local artist, Benjamin Donne, who would have known Mary and depicts her with her faithful dog, Tray, on the beach at Lyme.

Displayed alongside the picture is a very rare Ichthyosaurus breviceps discovered by Mary in 1832, which is on loan from the Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences in Cambridge.

No complete Mary Anning ichthyosaurus has ever been on show in Lyme until now.

Also on show for the first time is an exciting new acquisition, a recently discovered genus and species of extinct marine thalattosuchian crocodylomorph discovered by Paul Turner and Lizzie Hingley a short distance from where Mary herself would have gone fossil hunting.

Richard Hughes, executive secretary of the Geological Society, said: “The Geological Society is proud to be associated with the museum’s new exhibition on the life of Mary Anning and we are happy that we could assist with the loan of this now iconic portrait.

“Although many people have seen it hanging in the society’s premises at Burlington House, we hope many more will be able to see it on display in the town that was her home.”

Dr Paul Davis, geology curator at Lyme Regis Museum, says: ‘We are incredibly lucky to work with the excellent local collectors Paul and Lizzie and to benefit from their generous donation of this incredibly important specimen, which is so unique nobody, not even Mary Anning, has found one of these crocodylomorphs at Lyme Regis in the last 200 years.”

The exhibition runs until the end of September