David Meredith Seares Watson

David Meredith Seares Watson (born June 18, 1886 in Higher Broughton near Salford , Greater Manchester , Lancashire , † July 23, 1973 ) was a British paleontologist who researched mainly in the field of vertebrate paleontology . He held the Jodrell Professorship in Zoology and Comparative Anatomy at University College London from 1921 to 1951 and was given his services in the study of the fossil reptiles multiple awards.

Life

Watson was the only son of David Watson, a pioneer in metallurgy . After attending Manchester Grammar School , he enrolled in Geology at the University of Manchester, studying plant fossils in coal deposits. His degree, he passed with honors and became the Beyer - Fellow at the University of Manchester called. The degree of M.Sc. he received in 1909.

As a result of Watson, Watson expanded his studies on fossils and worked at the British Museum of Natural History in London , interrupted by extended stays in South Africa , Australia and the United States . In 1912 he was appointed professor of vertebrate paleontology at University College London by Professor James Peter Hill .

His academic work was interrupted in 1916 when he was in the First World War the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve reported. He was later transferred to the then emerging Royal Air Force , where he worked on the improvement of outer cover fabrics for balloons and airships .

In 1917 he married Katharine Margarite Parker, with whom he had two daughters, Katharine Mary and Janet Vida , the first female president of the Geological Society of London in 1982.

After World War I, Watson returned to academic life and in 1921 succeeded Professor Hill as Jodrell Professor of Zoology and Comparative Anatomy at University College London. He devoted himself to expanding the zoological faculty and gained a reputation as an academic. In 1922 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society , for which he held the Croonian Lecture in 1924 . Four years later he was invited to give the Romanes Lecture at the University of Oxford ; he talked about paleontology and human evolution .

In 1931 he was appointed to the Agricultural Research Council of the British Government, a position that resulted in, among other things, stays in the United States, where he lectured at Yale University in 1937 . At the outbreak of World War II , he returned to Britain to lead the evacuation of the Zoological Faculty to Bangor, Wales , and then became secretary of the scientific sub-committee of the War Cabinet's Food Policy Committee .

After the war he resumed teaching and undertook numerous research trips. In 1951 he gave up his professorship, but continued his studies and published numerous scientific articles until he completely withdrew from teaching and research in 1965.

Act

In his final year (1907) Watson published a pioneering work on plant-containing carbonate - concretions ( coal balls ) with Marie Stopes (still at that time Paläobotanikerin was). His scientific work later concentrated mainly on vertebrate paleontology, in particular on fossil reptiles, and he amassed a large collection of fossils on his extensive research trips. Interest in reptiles sparked in 1908 when Watson began studying the fossil remains of this group and other vertebrates . He spent much of his time in the British Museum of Natural History and collected fossils in many places in Britain . In 1911 the collections of fossil reptiles of the Karoo , which the British Museum owned, took him to South Africa, where he was involved in the biostratigraphic subdivision of the Beaufort group of the Karoo supergroups .

1914 Watson collected in Australia, and wrote the following year a treatise on the development of the platypus -Schädels. He returned to North America and collected mainly in Texas. The end of the First World War allowed him to return to England and from Newcastle upon Tyne to deal again with the fossils of the coal deposits. This time, however, the reptile and fish fossils of the Carboniferous Coal Measures were the subject of his interest. Watson wrote numerous articles on reptiles during the period leading up to his retirement, but also dealt with other scientific topics such as human development and the essence of the theory of evolution.

honors and awards

He has received numerous prizes and awards, including the Darwin Medal from the Royal Society , the Linné Medal from the Linnean Society of London , the Wollaston Medal from the Geological Society of London , and honorary doctorates from numerous universities. In 1941 Watson was awarded the Mary Clark Thompson Medal of the National Academy of Sciences , of which he had been a member since 1938. Since 1937 he was a corresponding member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences . In 1938 he was elected a member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina and in 1949 an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh . In 1951 he became an honorary member of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology . In 1953, Watson was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . He received the Darwin Wallace Medal of the Linnean Society of London in 1958.

The scientific library of University College London, the DMS Watson library , was named after him. It is the University College's second largest library and is located on Malet Place next to the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archeology .

Fonts (selection)

Watson has published numerous articles on vertebrate paleontology and related topics in the Philosophical Transactions , the Proceedings of the Zoological Society , the Journal of Anatomy, and other journals.

• Palaeontology and the Evolution of Man. Romanes Lecture, Clarendon Press, Oxford 1928.
• The Animal Bones from Skara Brae. 1931.
• Science and Government. Earl Gray Memorial Lecture 24, Newcastle-upon-Tyne 1942.
• Paleontology and Modern Biology. The Silliman Memorial Lecture, Yale University Press, New Haven 1951.
• The Brachyopid Labyrinthodonts. In: Bulletin of the British Museum of Natural History, Geology . Volume 2, No. 8, London 1956.
• A New Labyrinthodont, Paracyclotosaurus, from the Upper Trias of New South Wales. In: Bulletin of the British Museum of Natural History, Geology . Volume 3, No. 7, London 1958.
• The Anomodont Skeleton. In: Transactions of the Zoological Society of London . Volume 29, part 3, London 1960.

literature

• T. Stanley Westoll (Ed.): Studies on Fossil Vertebrates presented to David Meredith Seares Watson. Festschrift, 1958.
• FR Parrington, TS Westoll: David Meredith Seares Watson. 1886-1973. In: Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society . Volume 20, 1974, pp. 483-504.

References and footnotes

1. ↑ ^{a b} Watson Papers (MS ADD 386). Library Archive biographical notes, University College London
2. ↑ special attention because of unrelated ambiguous wording found at creationists a quote that in the magazine in 1929 Nature published (pp 231-234), " ... the theory of evolution itself, a theory universally accepted not Because it can be proved by logically coherent evidence to be true but because the only alternative, special creation, is clearly incredible. Evolution itself is accepted by zoologists not because it has been observed to occur or is supported by logically coherent arguments, but because it does fit all the facts of taxonomy, of paleontology, and geographical distribution, and because no alternative explanation is credible. “Quoted from: With Friends Like These ... Dumb Remarks by Scientists that Pseudoscientists Love. ( Memento of the original from July 20, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Homepage of Steven Dutch, Natural and Applied Sciences, University of Wisconsin - Green Bay 
3. ^ Mary Clark Thompson Medal . National Academy of Sciences. Archived from the original on December 8, 2015. Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Retrieved January 14, 2016. 
4. ^ David Meredith Seares Watson obituary in the 1974 yearbook of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences (PDF file).
5. ^ List of members Leopoldina, David Watson
6. ^ Fellows Directory. Biographical Index: Former RSE Fellows 1783–2002. (PDF file) Royal Society of Edinburgh, accessed April 20, 2020 . 
7. ^ Members of the American Academy. Listed by election year, 1950-1999 ( [1] ). Retrieved September 23, 2015