As a first-year undergraduate she was influenced towards geology by the teaching of Professor H. C. Richards, who became her mentor. She chose to pursue palaeontology in particular because it was an acceptable profession for a woman in Australia in the 1920s, because there was work to be done and because it did not require expensive equipment. Her passion for corals came, not from the nearby Great Barrier Reef, but from a holiday encounter with a small Lower Carboniferous reef in the Wide Bay district of Queensland. In 1930 she won a scholarship to Cambridge University, and during the next seven years studied the Carboniferous corals of Scotland and Queensland and, more importantly, undertook an original review of coral morphology.
Coupled with a prodigious taxonomic and biostratigraphic evaluation of Australian fossil coral faunas during the period 1937-42, this work established Dorothy Hill as the pre-eminent worker in the field. Her research with W. H. Bryan on spherulitic crystallization in hexacorals pioneered study of coral microstructure, which she introduced as a classification tool that remains widely used today; and her Re-interpretation of the Australian Palaeozoic Record, Based on a Study of the Rugose Corals of 1943 significantly advanced Australian stratigraphy, settling some long-standing disagreements on the ages of various strata.
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