Charles William Andrews (30 October 1866 – 25 May 1924)
F.R.S., was a British
palaeontologist whose career as a
vertebrate paleontologist, both as a curator and in the field, was spent in the services of the
British Museum, Department of Geology.
Biography
Andrews was born in
Hampstead, Middlesex .
A graduate of the
University of London, Andrews was awarded an assistant's position at the British Museum, after a competitive exam, in 1892. His first concerns were with
fossil birds, and he described ''
Aepyornis titan'', the extinct "Elephant Bird" of
Madagascar (1894). He noticed the connections among widely separated
flightless rails of
Mauritius, the
Chatham Islands and
New Zealand and deduced that their flightless character had been independently evolved on the spot.
Alfred Nicholson Leeds
Alfred Nicholson Leeds (9 March 184725 August 1917) was an English amateur palaeontologist.
Biography
Leeds was born at Eyebury, Peterborough, the youngest of the eight children of Edward Thurlow Leeds (180251) and Eliza Mary Leeds (née Nichol ...
' gifts to the British Museum of Jurassic marine reptiles from the
Oxford Clay of
Peterborough elicited his interest in
plesiosaur
The Plesiosauria (; Greek: πλησίος, ''plesios'', meaning "near to" and ''sauros'', meaning "lizard") or plesiosaurs are an order or clade of extinct Mesozoic marine reptiles, belonging to the Sauropterygia.
Plesiosaurs first appeared ...
s and other sea-reptiles which culminated in a catalogue of the Leeds collection at the British Museum (2 vols. 1910-13); his interest in this area did not flag afterwards: his last, posthumously-published paper concerned the skin impressions and other soft structures preserved in an
ichthyosaur
Ichthyosaurs (Ancient Greek for "fish lizard" – and ) are large extinct marine reptiles. Ichthyosaurs belong to the order known as Ichthyosauria or Ichthyopterygia ('fish flippers' – a designation introduced by Sir Richard Owen in 1842, altho ...
paddle from
Leicestershire
Leicestershire ( ; postal abbreviation Leics.) is a ceremonial and non-metropolitan county in the East Midlands, England. The county borders Nottinghamshire to the north, Lincolnshire to the north-east, Rutland to the east, Northamptonshire t ...
.
In 1897 he was selected to spend several months at
Christmas Island in the
Indian Ocean, to inspect it before the activities of
phosphate mining compromised its natural history. The results were published by the British Museum in 1900.
After 1900 his health began slowly to fail and he was sent to spend winter months in
Egypt; there he joined Beadnell of the Geological Survey of Egypt, inspecting fossils of freshwater fishes in the
Fayoum, where Andrews noticed mammalian fauna not previously detected and published ''
Moeritherium'' and an early elephant, ''
Palaeomastodon'', followed by his ''Descriptive Catalogue''.
[Andrews. ''A descriptive Catalogue of the Tertiary Vertebrata of the Fayûm, Egypt'' (British Museum), 1906, in connection with which he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in the same year.]
In 1916 he was awarded the
Lyell Medal of the Geological Society. He was also an active member of the Zoological Society.
Notes
External links
*
*
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Andrews, Charles William
English zoologists
English taxonomists
1866 births
1924 deaths
Paleozoologists
English palaeontologists
Fellows of the Royal Society
Fellows of the Zoological Society of London
Lyell Medal winners
Alumni of the University of London
People from Hampstead
19th-century British zoologists
20th-century British zoologists