Thomas McKenny Hughes

Thomas McKenny Hughes ( born December 17, 1832 in Aberystwyth, † June 9, 1917 ) 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 in 1853 at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he heard geology among others, Adam Sedgwick. In 1857 he received his degree ( much later in 1867 he received an MA degree in Cambridge ). 1860/61 he was secretary of the British consul in Rome, Charles Newton. There he became interested in archeology and collected fossils in the area of Rome. After his return in 1861 he worked for the Geological Survey under Roderick Murchison. He worked during this time, including 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 undertook journeys. From 1873 he was professor of geology at Cambridge Woodwardian as successor to Adam Sedgwick, a position he held 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 and paleontological named after Sedgwick Museum in Cambridge ( 1904). He was a great teacher with Cambridge with his students made ​​it one of the leading training centers for geologists in England.

It 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.

His estate, located mostly in the Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences, partially also in the Cambridge University Library.