Thomas McKenny Hughes

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Thomas McKenny Hughes (born December 17, 1832 in Aberystwyth , † June 9, 1917 in Cambridge ) was a British geologist and paleontologist .

Hughes was one of nine children of the Welsh Bishop Joshua Hughes (1807-1889), attended school in Leamington and Llandovery and studied from 1853 at Trinity College, Cambridge University , where he heard geology from Adam Sedgwick . He graduated in 1857 (much later he received an MA degree from Cambridge in 1867). In 1860/61 he was secretary to the British consul in Rome , Charles Newton. There he began to be interested in archeology and collected fossils in the area around Rome. After returning in 1861 he worked for the Geological Survey under Roderick Murchison . During this time he worked in the Lake District , where he collected fossils of the Silurian, in Westmoreland, Cumberland and Yorkshire ( Yorkshire Dales ). From the 1870s he corresponded with Charles Lyell , with whom he also traveled. From 1873 he was Woodwardian Professor of Geology at Cambridge as the successor to Adam Sedgwick, which he remained until 1917. In 1882 he married Mary Caroline Weston . In 1883 he became a Fellow of Clare College . Hughes also initiated the establishment of the geological-paleontological museum named after Sedgwick in Cambridge (1904). He was an important teacher who made Cambridge and his students one of the leading training centers for geologists in England.

He dealt mainly with the Precambrian and Paleozoic of Wales and the Lake District.

In 1889 he became a Fellow of the Royal Society and in 1891 he received the Lyell Medal . In 1862 he became Vice President of the Geological Society of London . The Hughes Glacier in Antarctica is named in his honor .

Most of his estate is in the Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences , some also in the Cambridge University Library .

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personal data
SURNAME Hughes, Thomas McKenny
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British geologist
DATE OF BIRTH December 17, 1832
PLACE OF BIRTH Aberystwyth
DATE OF DEATH June 9, 1917
Place of death Cambridge