Her life's work was to find fossils of recently extinct mammals with a view to understanding how and why giant and dwarf forms evolved.

Finding herself sexually harassed by the British Vice-Consul in Majorca, Bate commented: "I do hate old men who try to make love to one and ought not to in their official positions.

According to The Daily Telegraph[3] – Her days were spent on foot or mule, traversing barren and bandit-infested terrains and sleeping in flea-ridden hovels and shacks.

She would wade through turbulent swells to reach isolated cliff caves where she scuffled about, covered in mud and clay, never without her collecting bag, nets, insect boxes, hammer and – later – dynamite.In the late 1920s Bate travelled to the British ruled Palestine.

Bates had been invited by Dorothy Garrod, who later became Cambridge University's first female professor and who had been put in charge of an excavation in Haifa by the British military governor.

[11] In the 1930s Bate studied the animal bones Garrod had excavated in the Mount Carmel caves, which contained a succession of Upper Pleistocene levels.

Instead of just inferring climatic conditions from the presence or absence of cold- or warm-loving animals, she was an early pioneer of the approach to take large samples of fauna of a succession of archaeological strata.

Bate worked on the basis that alterations in the frequency of species of animal hunted by early man reflected naturally occurring changes.

[6] Many archaeologists and anthropologists relied on her expertise in identifying fossil bones, including Louis Leakey, Charles McBurney, and John Desmond Clark.

[2] During the Second World War, Bate transferred from the Natural History Museum's department of geology in London to its zoological branch at Tring, and in 1948, a few months short of her seventieth birthday, she was appointed officer-in-charge there.

[16] In 2005, a 'Dorothea Bate facsimile' was created at the Natural History Museum as part of a project to develop notable gallery characters to patrol its display cases.