Cyril Walker (paleontologist)
Cyril Alexander Walker ( born February 8, 1939 in London, † 6 May 2009) was a British ornithologist and paleontologist, curator of fossil birds at the Natural History Museum in London was.
His father had a fruit and vegetable shop and he attended school in Ealing and Acton Technical College, where he took courses in zoology and botany.
He was from 1958 at the Natural History Museum, was founded in 1972 and became curator in 1985 Senior Scientific Officer. He was co-director of a number of expeditions of the museum, including several times in the Trans - Sahara. Here in 1979 he was arrested on one occasion in Nigeria with the other members of the expedition and put under house arrest. In 1988, his expedition a new Sauropodenart in Agadez in Niger, and was supported by a BBC film crew accompanied ( BBC series Lost Worlds, Vanished Lives by David Attenborough ).
He is best known for introducing the group of Enantiornithes 1981, at that time due to less incomplete findings from Argentina.
In 1986 he was one of the authors of a rejection of the claims made by Fred Hoyle and others that Archaeopteryx discoveries were forgeries of the 19th century. In 1978 an expedition led by him in Queensland the earliest Herring Fossils ( from the Cretaceous ).
He was a specialist in fossil birds from the Late Cretaceous and Eocene (especially Isle of Sheppey ). Besides birds, he also dealt with fossil turtles from Britain and North Africa. At the museum he worked a lot with the ornithologist Colin Harrison. Both first described in 1975 theropods Bradycneme and Heptasteornis from Romania and 1973 the early Cretaceous bird from England Wyleyia valdensis
His book with British veterinarian and amateur paleontologist David Ward ( born 1948 ) about fossils became a bestseller.
He was a Fellow of the Linnean Society of London and the Royal Geographic Society.
He was married three times.
Writings
- David J. Ward Fossils, Smithsonian Handbook, Dorling Kindersley 2992 2010
- Consultant at Noble Proctor Garden Birds: how to attract birds to your garden, Rodale Press 1986