William Parker Foulke

William Parker Foulke ( 1816 - June 18, 1865 in Philadelphia ) was an American lawyer, philanthropist , reformer and hobby geologist. The latter activity led him to discover the first almost complete dinosaur skeleton on North American soil in 1858, the Hadrosaurus foulkii .

Foulke is descended from Welsh Quakers who emigrated to America in 1698. His parents were Richard Parker Foulke and Anna Catherine Strohn Foulke. In 1855 Julia married DeVeaux Powel, with whom he had seven children.

He studied law and was in 1841 as a barrister admitted. Four years later, in July 1845, Foulke began his engagement with the Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Miseries in Public Prisons , an organization that campaigned for prison reform. He spent many years studying and comparing different disciplinary models. These studies resulted in several articles with suggestions for improvement, which he published in a magazine and several pamphlets. 1847/48 he was involved in the establishment of the new Lancaster County prison.

His second major engagement was a lot more controversial. In September 1845, Foulke became a member of the Pennsylvania Colonization Society , an anti-slavery society that organized the relocation of 1,000 freed slaves to Liberia each year . At the time of his death, despite all the criticism, Foulke was already Vice President of the Society.

He was also a member and supporter of the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences , the American Academy of Music , the Historical Society of Pennsylvania and, like his grandfather before him, the American Philosophical Society . He helped fund the first expeditions to the Arctic , and in his spare time he did geology and fossils. This also led to his great find.

He spent the summer of 1858 with his friend John E. Hopinks in Haddonfield , New Jersey , where he learned that several years earlier workers had found large bones in a nearby marl pit on the property. With the permission of his host, he then spent the rest of the summer digging until he finally discovered the almost complete skeleton of a very large animal. He then got in touch with the paleontologist Joseph Leidy , who identified the find and named it after the discoverer Hadrosourus foulkii (Eng. Foulke's big lizard ).

Web links

• The Foulke Family site (English)
• William Parker Foulke Papers (English)