Leonard Spath

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Leonard Frank Spath ( October 20, 1882 - March 2, 1957 ) was a British paleontologist at the Natural History Museum in London .

Spath studied geology at Birkbeck College, University of London with a bachelor's degree in 1912. He was then a curator at the Natural History Museum, where he was among other things to field studies in Newfoundland and Tunisia. He also taught at Birkbeck College and received a D. Sc. of the University of London.

He wrote a monograph on the Ammonites of Trias from the collections of the Natural History Museum. From this he developed a biochronological time scale (according to the methods of Sydney S. Buckman (1860–1929), who proceeded accordingly for the Jura and its ammonites). This was based on the evolution of the ammonites, but had closer ties to stratigraphy than Buckman, built on Edmund Mojsisovics from Mojsvár and his school and incorporated the results of James Perrin Smith . But he was also considered one of the leading experts on ammonites (and nautiloids) of the other epochs of the Mesozoic Era (Jurassic, Cretaceous).

He has produced over 100 publications and monographs (including on ammonites from Greenland, India, Pakistan and Iran).

In 1945 he received the Lyell Medal . In 1940 he became a Fellow of the Royal Society .

The space is indirectly (via a ravine on Ellesmere Island ) named after him by Edward Timothy Tozer . Since 1972 he has also given its name to the Spath Crest mountain range in the East Antarctic Coatsland and since 1995 also for the Spath Peninsula on Snow Hill Island in the Antarctic Weddell Sea.

Fonts

  • Catalog of the fossil Cephalopoda in the British Museum (Natural History), Part IV: The Ammonoidea of ​​the Trias , The Trustees of the British Museum 1934
  • Catalog of the fossil Cephalopoda in the British Museum (Natural History), Part V: The Ammonoidea of ​​the Trias (II) , The Trustees of the British Museum 1951
  • A catalog of the ammonites of the Liassic family Liparoceratidae in the British Museum (Natural History), British Museum 1938

literature

  • LR Cox: Leonard Frank Spath 1882-1957 , Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society 3, 1957, pp. 217-226
  • Spencer G. Lucas, The Triassic chronostratigraphic scale: history and status, in Spencer G. Lucas (Ed.), The triassic timescale, Geological Society Special Publication 334, 2010, pp. 17-41
personal data
SURNAME Spath, Leonard
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Spath, Leonard Frank
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British paleontologist
DATE OF BIRTH October 20, 1882
DATE OF DEATH March 2, 1957