John William Salter

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John William Salter ( December 15, 1820 - December 2, 1869 ) was a British paleontologist.

Life

Salter drew and engraved from 1835 for the Mineral Conchology , English Botany and other works by James de Carle Sowerby and classified fossils for Adam Sedgwick in the Woodwardian Museum in Cambridge (with contributions to his catalog of the museum's fossils from the Cambrian and Silurian, published 1873), where he accompanied Sedgwick on geological excursions in Wales from 1842 to 1845. From 1846 to 1863 he worked as a paleontologist in the Geological Survey of Great Britain, focusing on paleozoic fossils, especially from Wales. Salter suffered from depression and was most recently in financial difficulties. In 1869 he drowned himself in the Thames.

In his time he was considered the leading authority on trilobites , where he introduced the order Agnostida , among other things . He published monographs on British trilobites, contributed the paleontological section on the geology of North Wales by Andrew Crombie Ramsay (1866) and on Siluria by Roderick Murchison (1854 and later editions). He was also a pioneer in the discovery of Precambrian fossils in Great Britain ( Ediacaran Fauna , Longmydian Supergroup, Shropshire ).

In 1846 he married the daughter Sally von Sowerby, with whom he had seven children.

The Salter embedding ( Rudolf Richter 1937) of trilobites is named after him, a fossil tradition in which the front part is rotated 180 degrees (top side down and separated), but the trunk and tail are traditionally handed with the curvature upwards. It is interpreted as an indication of a moult and evidence of a tradition as an exuuvia . It is only found in Phacopida from the Devonian. The phenomenon was first described by Salter in 1862.

Fonts

  • A Monograph of British Trilobites, Parts 1 to 4, Palaeontographical Society, London, Monograph, 1864 to 1867

literature

  • James A. Secord: John W. Salter: The rise and fall of a Victorian palaeontological career , Archives of Natural History, Volume 1, 1985, pp. 61-75.
  • Thomas George Bonney, Dictionary of National Biography , 1897
  • Richard HT Callow, Duncan McIlroy, Martin D. Brasier: John Salter and the Ediacara Fauna of the Longmyndian Supergroup , Ichnos: An International Journal for Plant and Animal Traces, Volume 18, 2011, pp. 176-187

Web links

References and comments

  1. ↑ Salter's petition to Charles Darwin, 1866
  2. ↑ Spectrum Lexicon of Biology
  3. ↑ Ulrich Lehmann, Paleontological Dictionary, 4th edition, Springer Spectrum 2014
personal data
SURNAME Salter, John William
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British paleontologist
DATE OF BIRTH December 15, 1820
DATE OF DEATH December 2, 1869