In commemoration of the 75th anniversary of the Palaeontological Society of Japan, I review early women paleontologists in Japan. In 1907, the English birth control pioneer, Marie Stopes (1880-1958) came to Japan to study plant fossils. In 1910 she wrote on Cretaceous plants in Hokkaido. In 1928, a botanist Kono Yasui (1880-1971) got a doctoral degree in science, the first one in Japan given to a woman, by studying lignite and coal in Hokkaido. In 1937 and 1947, a high-school teacher, Yone Matsumoto, wrote at least two papers on paleobotany. It was 1943 when the first woman paleontologist Takayo Fujiwara (1916-1992) attended at the Geological Society of Japan. She studied biochemistry of organic matters in fossils. Tomoko Hayami (1943-1988) was the first woman that published the studies on bryozoan fossils in 1970 and 1971 from the Palaeontological Society of Japan.
