Robert Milson Appleby
Robert Milson Appleby (born April 28, 1922 in Denton , † February 8, 2004 in Grimsby ) was a British paleontologist . He was primarily concerned with the history of ichthyosaur development and was one of the leading scientists in this field throughout his life.
Life
Robert Appleby was born in Denton near Manchester in 1922 . He attended Hulme Grammar School and later began studying geology at Manchester University . With the outbreak of World War II , Appleby was drafted into the Navy , where he navigated convoys for the Soviet Union on the HMS Bermuda . Its main task was to guide ships through the German submarine belt in the North Atlantic into the Barents Sea . During this time he mainly dealt with the functioning of radar technology in order to detect and avoid sea mines .
After his military service, Appleby took a position as assistant curator of geology at the Leicester Museum . There he met his future wife Valerie, who worked as a curator for art at the museum. In the meantime, he continued his studies part-time, earning a master's degree and later a PhD from Manchester University . In 1954 he accepted a teaching position at Cardiff University . Two years later he married and moved with his wife to Dinas Powys near Cardiff . In Cardiff, Appleby turned to the group of ichthyosaurs . During the 1950s and 1960s, he was the only paleontologist in Great Britain who studied her in detail. Although he worked on a number of projects, Appleby published comparatively little. As a matter of principle, he did not publish texts until he was completely satisfied with them, which resulted in a number of unfinished essays and books.
In the 1960s, Appleby and Graham Jones developed the analogue video reshaper method based on his knowledge of radar in order to morphologically compare the deformed fossils of ichthyosaurs with those of dolphins . The principle was based on a virtual grid, the lines of which could be moved independently of each other, the mathematical theory for this was developed by D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson . This enabled flattened images to be given spatial depth. The method, which Appleby had patented in 1968, was also used outside of paleontology: at a technology fair, it aroused the interest of the British Home Office. AVR offered the option of comparing fingerprints on rounded surfaces or those that were only partially preserved with two-dimensional images from the card index. Appleby's development was also used in forensics . In 1974 Appleby was made a member of the Royal Institution .
1981 Appleby retired and settled with his wife in Healing ( Lincolnshire down). He turned to a monograph on the ichthyosaurs that would take up most of his work over the coming decades. Shortly before the completion of the manuscript, he fell ill with pneumonia in 2004 and died shortly afterwards in Grimsby Hospital . His unfinished projects, such as the description of the fossils that were later brought to Acamptonectes and Malawania , have since been viewed, revised and published by Jeff Liston .
literature
- RM Appleby, GL Jones: The Analogue Video Reshaper: A New Tool for Palaeontologists . In: Palaeontology 19 (3), 1976. pp. 565-586. ( Full text ; PDF; 2.5 MB)
- John W. Baker: Robert Appleby . In: The Telegraph , www.telegraph.co.uk, March 8, 2004.
Individual evidence
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Appleby, Robert Milson |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | British paleontologist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | April 28, 1922 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | The tone |
| DATE OF DEATH | February 8, 2004 |
| Place of death | Grimsby |