Cyril Alexander Walker
Cyril Alexander Walker (born February 8, 1939 in London - † May 6, 2009 ) was a British ornithologist and paleontologist who was a curator for fossil birds at the Natural History Museum in London.
His father ran a fruit and vegetable store and he attended school in Ealing and Acton Technical College, where he took courses in zoology and botany.
He was at the Natural History Museum from 1958, became a curator in 1972 and became Senior Scientific Officer there in 1985. He has co-led a number of the museum's expeditions, including several to the Trans-Sahara. On one occasion in Nigeria in 1979 he was arrested with the other expedition members and placed under house arrest. In 1988 his expedition found a new species of sauropod in Agadez in Niger and was accompanied by a BBC film team (BBC series Lost Worlds, Vanished Lives by David Attenborough ).
He is best known for the introduction of the group of enantiornithes in 1981, at that time due to fewer incomplete finds from Argentina.
In 1986 he was one of the authors of a rejection of claims by Fred Hoyle and others that the Archeopteryx finds were falsifications from the 19th century. In 1978 an expedition he led in Queensland found the earliest herring fossils (from the chalk).
He was a specialist in fossil birds from the late Cretaceous and the Eocene (especially Isle of Sheppey ). In addition to birds, he also looked at fossil turtles from Great Britain and North Africa. At the museum he worked a lot with the ornithologist Colin Harrison . Both first described the theropods Bradycneme and Heptasteornis from Romania in 1975 and the early Cretaceous bird Wyleyia valdensis from England in 1973 .
His book on fossils with British veterinarian and amateur paleontologist David Ward (* 1948) became a bestseller.
He was a Fellow of the Linnean Society of London and the Royal Geographic Society .
He was married three times.
Fonts
- with David J. Ward Fossils , Smithsonian Handbook, Dorling Kindersley 1992, 2010
- Consultant at Noble Proctor Garden Birds: how to attract birds to your garden , Rodale Press 1986
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Walker New subclass of birds from the Cretaceous of South America , Nature, 252, 1981, 51-53
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Walker, Cyril Alexander |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | British paleontologist and ornithologist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | February 8, 1939 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | London |
| DATE OF DEATH | May 6, 2009 |