Samuel Stutchbury

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Samuel Stutchbury (born January 15, 1798 in London , † February 12, 1859 in Bristol ) was a British naturalist, paleontologist and geologist . He was a pioneer in geological exploration of Australia and dinosaur paleontology.

Life

Stutchbury was after he had studied some science and medicine, first from 1820 assistant to William Clift (1775-1849) at the Hunterian Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons of England . During this time he played a role in the naming of the Iguanodon by Gideon Mantell , whom he pointed out to the similarity of the teeth with those of the iguana (genus Iguana ). It was the second dinosaur ever described.

Stutchbury became a naturalist in July 1825 on the expedition of the Pacific Pearl Fishing Company to New South Wales and the Pacific Islands, especially the Tuamotu Archipelago , on board the Sir George Osborne (to Sydney and later from Tahiti) and the Rolla . In doing so, he collected extensive conchylia and made friends with missionaries who were also on board. After returning in 1827, he worked for his brother Henry Rome Stutchbury (1796-1853), who traded in kind. However, he only viewed this as a temporary job and applied for an official position as a naturalist, initially unsuccessfully as a curator at the Museum of the University of London. In 1831 he became a curator of the Bristol Philosophical Institution, which he remained until 1850. He was also in demand as an expert in the geology of coal. When a gold rush broke out in Australia in 1849, a geologist was called in. Stutchbury took the opportunity and went to New South Wales as a geologist and mineral prospector. One reason was that he was only paid irregularly in Bristol. In Australia he undertook expeditions inland, where he was threatened by Aborigines, and examined and prospected gold and coal deposits. However, he saw himself poorly treated by official bodies (they were primarily interested in the search for gold and coal) and an open letter he published about it in the Sydney Morning Herald in 1854 intensified the conflicts with his clients. In 1855 he successfully exhibited some of his geological and paleontological finds in the Australian Museum. In 1856 he returned to Bristol, where he continued to work as a consultant for coal mining. But he fell ill and died impoverished. He is buried in Amos Vale Cemetery, where his grave can still be seen.

He published on lizards and marine fauna of his Pacific voyage, but in Bristol increasingly turned to local geology and paleontology. In Australia he was significantly involved in the geological survey of the land. His work is in official reports and was included in the geological mapping of Robert Brough Smyth (published 1875).

On his Pacific voyage on behalf of the commercial pearl fishing society, he anticipated Charles Darwin (1842) in the study of the formation of coral reefs. He also published his finds in 1835, which attracted widespread attention at the time. In Sydney Harbor he discovered a clam of the genus Trigonia and recognized it as a living fossil.

In 1836 he first described with Henry Riley (1797–1848) Thecodontosaurus , a small sauropod they called Palaeosaurus. The name was already documented by Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire in 1833, for a genus that is now counted among the Teleosauridae , possibly as a juvenile steneosaurus . Thecodontosaurus was the fourth species of dinosaur to be described and the first from the Triassic . The specimen had been found near Bristol two years earlier.

In 1841 he became a Fellow of the Geological Society of London and a member of the Linnean Society of London . In 1820 he married and had a daughter.

The fossil mollusc genus Stutchburia is named in his honor.

literature

  • DF Branagan: Science in a Sea of ​​Commerce. The Journal of a South Seas Trading Venture (1825-27) by Samuel Stutchbury. Hippo Books, Australia 1966 * MD Crane: Samuel Stutchbury (1793–1857), naturalist and geologist. Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, Volume 37, 1983, pp. 189-200.
  • MA Taylor: The plesiosaur's birthplace: the Bristol Institution and its contribution to vertebrate palaeontology, Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society, Volume 112, 1994, pp. 179-196.
  • Michael J. Benton : Naming the Bristol dinosaur, Thecodontosaurus: politics and science in the 1830s. Proceedings of the Geologists' Association, Vol. 123, 2012, pp. 766-778

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Roy M. MacLeod, Philip E. Rehbock (eds.): Darwin's Laboratory: Evolutionary Theory and Natural History in the Pacific, University of Hawaii Press 1994, p. 288
  2. ↑ Randy Moore, Dinosaurs by the decade, ABC-Clio, Santa Barbara 2014, p. 33
personal data
SURNAME Stutchbury, Samuel
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British naturalist, paleontologist and geologist
DATE OF BIRTH January 15, 1798
PLACE OF BIRTH London
DATE OF DEATH February 12, 1859
Place of death Bristol