Charles Lapworth

Charles Lapworth ( born September 20, 1842 in Faringdon (Berkshire ), † March 13, 1920 in Birmingham ) was an English geologist.

Born in Faringdon in Berkshire (now Oxfordshire ) and trained as a teacher, to Lapworth settled in the border region to Scotland, where he examined the hitherto little-known fossil fauna of the area. He married in 1869 and remained in the area. After patient geological mapping and ground-breaking use of the analysis of index fossils showed Lapworth that he examined the rock series, which was previously considered a thick sequence of rocks from the Silurian, was in reality a much thinner rock sequence, which in many cases by folding and disorders was repeated.

Lapworth was a professor at several universities and received many awards for his work. His most famous work is the study of Silurian strata using index fossils, especially certain types of graptolites, and (later officially recognized ) proposal, the layers between the Cambrian of North Wales and the Silurium of South Wales to strike a new geological system: the Ordovician. This proposal ended a heated argument about the age of the relevant layers, which smoldered for a long time between the British geologist Adam Sedgwick and Roderick Murchison.

Charles Lapworth devoted his time and the geological mapping near Durness in Scotland's north-west Highlands, and was the first who expressed the highly controversial claim that there subject older rocks over younger, which was caused by complicated folding or disorder. Later, the British geologist Ben Peach and John Horne were sent there, and their extensive investigations proved the correctness of Lapworths theory.

Honors

Lapworth has received many awards for his pioneering work and his contributions to geology. In 1891 he received the then largest award for his work, the Gold Medal of the Royal Society, and in 1899 awarded him the Geological Society of London with its highest honor from the Wollaston Medal, which they him for his services in the geological exploration of the Southern Uplands and the North West Highlands of Scotland awarded.

The Lapworth Medal of the Palaeontological Association is named after him. The Department of Geology at the University of Birmingham bears his name.

Lapworth Museum

Numerous writings of Charles Lapworth found in the Special Collections of the University of Birmingham. The University also maintains the Lapworth Museum, which is located in the Aston Webb building of the main Edgbaston campus. The Lapworth Archive, which is housed in the museum, contains a remarkably complete collection of his areas of research and lectures.