Ronald Pearson Tripp

FRSE Fellowship of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (FRSE) is an award granted to individuals that the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Scotland's national academy of science and letters, judged to be "eminently distinguished in their subject". This soci ...

(19142001) was a British palaeontologist specializing in

trilobites Trilobites (; meaning "three lobes") are extinct marine arthropods that form the class Trilobita. Trilobites form one of the earliest-known groups of arthropods. The first appearance of trilobites in the fossil record defines the base of the At ...

. He was self-taught in palaeontology and became an authority on the

taxonomy Taxonomy is the practice and science of categorization or classification. A taxonomy (or taxonomical classification) is a scheme of classification, especially a hierarchical classification, in which things are organized into groups or types. ...

of the trilobite order

Lichida Lichida is an order of typically spiny trilobite that lived from the Furongian to the Devonian period. These trilobites usually have 8–13 thoracic The thorax or chest is a part of the anatomy of humans, mammals, and other tetrapod animals l ...

and the trilobite family

Encrinuridae Encrinuridae is a family of trilobite within the order Phacopida that lived in what would be Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, North America, and South America from the middle Ordovician to the early Devonian from , existing for approximately . T ...

Early life

Encouraged by his school science master, Ron enthusiastically collected

Tertiary Tertiary ( ) is a widely used but obsolete term for the geologic period from 66 million to 2.6 million years ago. The period began with the demise of the non-avian dinosaurs in the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event, at the start ...

fossils in

Suffolk Suffolk () is a ceremonial county of England in East Anglia. It borders Norfolk to the north, Cambridgeshire to the west and Essex to the south; the North Sea lies to the east. The county town is Ipswich; other important towns include Lowes ...

. He later collected in the

Cretaceous The Cretaceous ( ) is a geological period that lasted from about 145 to 66 million years ago (Mya). It is the third and final period of the Mesozoic Era, as well as the longest. At around 79 million years, it is the longest geological period of th ...

rocks of

Kent Kent is a county in South East England and one of the home counties. It borders Greater London to the north-west, Surrey to the west and East Sussex to the south-west, and Essex to the north across the estuary of the River Thames; it faces ...

and

Sussex Sussex (), from the Old English (), is a historic county in South East England that was formerly an independent medieval Anglo-Saxon kingdom. It is bounded to the west by Hampshire, north by Surrey, northeast by Kent, south by the English ...

, and

Ordovician The Ordovician ( ) is a geologic period and System (geology), system, the second of six periods of the Paleozoic Era (geology), Era. The Ordovician spans 41.6 million years from the end of the Cambrian Period million years ago (Mya) to the start ...

rocks of the

Girvan Girvan ( gd, Inbhir Gharbhain, "mouth of the River Girvan") is a burgh and harbour town in Carrick, South Ayrshire, Scotland. Girvan is situated on the east coast of the Firth of Clyde, with a population of about 6,450. It lies south of Ayr, ...

area. The latter material was used in the studies of F.R.C. Reed. He trained as a Spitfire pilot in World War II, and published his first paper in 1954 on the Ordovician trilobites of Girvan. Many other papers would follow. He was employed by British Cake and Oils from early on until about 1970.

Treatise on Invertebrate Paleontology

During preparation of the first edition of the

Treatise on Invertebrate Paleontology The ''Treatise on Invertebrate Paleontology'' (or ''TIP'') published by the Geological Society of America and the University of Kansas Press, is a definitive multi-authored work of some 50 volumes, written by more than 300 paleontologists, and co ...

Cyril James Stubblefield Sir (Cyril) James Stubblefield FRS (1901–1999) was a British geologist. Stubblefield was the president of the Geological Society of London from 1958 to 1960 and was the director of the Geological Survey of Great Britain from 1960 until 1966. E ...

asked Tripp to step in to write the Lichid section of the Trilobite volume, in place of Elsa Warburg, who had died before her work was complete. As part of this ambitious effort, Tripp established the new family, Lichakephalidae.

Work on the Encrinuridae

By the time Tripp had begun working on the Treatise, he became interested in the tuberculated family of trilobites---the Encrinuridae. Elaborating on the work of Russian palaeontologist, Elsa Rosenstein, Tripp began developing an innovative system of distinguishing encrinurid taxa on the basis of the arrangement of their glabellar tubercles. For the next several decades, this was an important part of encrinurine diagnoses. For example, he used glabellar tubercle arrangement to help characterize "species groups" that F.R.C. Reed had recognized within ''Encrinurus''. This set the groundwork for an eventual major splitting of a genus that had become a virtual garbage pail of encrinurids. While he did author some of these genera himself to ease this confusion, he was extremely cautious to avoid over-splitting and creating too many names.

Later years

While as Research Associate at the Natural History Museum (London) and Royal Ontario Museum, Tripp conducted numerous trilobite studies, particularly concerning encrinurid taxonomy. His colleagues and co-authors during or prior to that time included

Euan Clarkson Euan N.K. Clarkson FRSE (born 1937) is a British palaeontologist and writer. Career Euan Clarkson studied geology at the University of Cambridge and had a long career as a palaeontologist at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. Clarkson's most no ...

, Bill Evitt,

Richard Fortey Richard Alan Fortey FRS FRSL (born 15 February 1946 in London) is a British palaeontologist, natural historian, writer and television presenter, who served as president of the Geological Society of London for its bicentennial year of 2007. Ea ...

, Chris Gass, Yvonne Howells, Keith Ingham, Rolf Ludvigsen, David Rudkin,

, John Temple, Steve Tunnicliff, Harry Whittington, and Zhou Zhi-yi. Ron's wife, Doris, whom he had met during his years in Scotland, died in 1980. He married Phyllis Forrest in 1981, and died at their home in Toronto in 2001.

References

External links

Former Fellows of the Royal Society of Edinburgh
{{DEFAULTSORT:Tripp, Ronald Person 1914 births 2001 deaths 20th-century British geologists English palaeontologists Fellows of the Royal Society of Edinburgh