William Parker Foulke

William Parker Foulke (* 1816, † June 18, 1865 in Philadelphia ) was an American attorney, philanthropist, reformer and amateur geologist. The latter activity led to the discovery of the first nearly complete dinosaur skeleton he was in 1858 on North American soil, foulkii of Hadrosaurus.

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

He studied law and was called to the Bar in 1841. Four years later, Foulke began in July 1845 his commitment to the Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Miseries in Public Prisons, an organization that strongly argued for prison reforms. He spent many years trying to study different disciplinary models and compare. From these studies, several contributions emerged with suggestions for improvement, which he published in a magazine and several pamphlets. 1847/48 he was involved in the construction of the new Lancaster County Prison.

His second major commitment was controversial to some. Foulke was in September 1845 Member of the Pennsylvania Colonization Society, an anti-slavery society, which organized the resettlement of 1,000 freed slaves to Liberia every year. At the time of his death Foulke was despite all the criticism already Vice- President of the Society.

He was also a member and supporter of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, the American Academy of Music, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, and like his grandfather before him, the American Philosophical Society. He contributed to the financing of the first expeditions to the Arctic and occupied his leisure with geology and fossils. This also led to his great discovery.

The summer of 1858 he spent with his friend John E. Hopinks in Haddonfield, New Jersey, where he learned that workers had big bones in a nearby marl pit found a few years earlier on the plot. With the permission of his host, he spent the next summer with the remaining excavation work until he finally discovered the nearly complete skeleton of a very large animal. He subsequently went to the paleontologist Joseph Leidy in contact, who identified the find and called it after the discoverer Hadrosourus foulkii (German Foulkes large lizard ).