Harry B. Whittington

Harry Blackmore Whittington ( born March 24, 1916 in Birmingham, † June 20, 2010 in Cambridge ) was a British paleontologist. He became internationally known for his studies on the fossils of the Burgess Shale and was regarded as "the world's leading authority on trilobites ".

Life

Harry Whittington grew up in Birmingham, where he attended Handsworth grammar school and acquired in 1937 from the University of Birmingham his doctorate with a thesis on the geology of the Berwyn Hills, North Wales, where he determined the age of the rock with the help of brachiopods and trilobites. In 1938 he came thanks to a scholarship ( Commonwealth Fellowship ) to the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, where he conducted research also focuses on certain trilobites from the Ordovician ( Trinucleidea ). Two years later, he took a teaching position as a lecturer in Yangon (formerly Burma ), which he, however, soon, shortly before the 1942 occupation of Burma carried out by Japanese troops had to retire again. He managed to emigrate to China and to save them until 1945 in Chengdu as a teacher at Ginling Women's College its upkeep.

After the end of hostilities in Europe Whittington returned to Birmingham in 1945 and was initially as a Lecturer. Near the North Wales town of Bala he continued his geological and paleontological studies of the Ordovician rocks and the silicified trilobites contained in them (fossils, in which the organic material is "replaced" by silicon compounds was ). In 1949 he transferred to the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University in Cambridge ( Massachusetts ), remained active for the next he 's 16 years. In 1966 he became head of a research team of the Geological Survey of Canada, which studied the fossils of the Burgess Shale ( Burgess Shale ) in the Canadian Rocky Mountains and moved in the same year at the University of Cambridge, where he was most recently Woodwardian Professor of Geology; his successor at Harvard was Stephen Jay Gould. Only by Whittington's research, the meaning of those references has been known in the art world internationally.

Harry Whittington was married from 1940 to 1997 with Dorothy Arnold. The couple had no children. In 2002, both the HB and Dorothy A. Whittington Fund donated to support the paleontological research at the University of Cambridge.

Research Topics

After Whittington had gone in 1949 from England to the United States, he studied in particular the individual development of trilobites based on fossilized larvae, juvenile stages and adult forms of Virginia, Newfoundland and North Wales. In the following 16 years he established himself " as the international authority on trilobites ". Since the juvenile stages were often less than a millimeter long, he had to - in a time before the invention of scanning electron microscopy - develop new photographic methods to illustrate his publications understandable and to document the microfossils. His work are due to important insights into the morphology and evolution of trilobites; also first insights into the composition of some communities of the Ordovician, which now distant tectonic plates ranged part of time, from which to draw conclusions about the drift of the continental plates are possible.

When Whittington's most important contribution to scientific research his studies on the Burgess Shale apply. These fossils deposit was indeed discovered and described in 1909 by Charles Walcott, but thereafter remained largely unnoticed. Only by starting from 1966 directed by Whittington, recent field studies, their significance for the understanding of the so-called Cambrian explosion has been recognized internationally.

One of the first animals that examined Whittington exactly Marrella was the most common genus of that era, but which belonged neither to the trilobites nor to the chelicerates or to the Crustacea. His research group has developed several new methods to draw conclusions from the flattened fossils in the rock to its original, three-dimensional look to. So, among other things, in 1972 initially ridiculed, but later accepted reconstruction of fünfäugigen Opabinia with its unique " trunk " and the rudder -like tail.

1985 summed Whittington together by then gained insights into the early evolution of animal phyla in his textbook The Burgess Shale, which was, however, little attention outside of the professional world. It was only after Stephen Jay Gould four years later his popular book Wonderful Life: had published The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History and it presented the bizarre discoveries of fossil deposit in detail, the Burgess Shale also got into the focus of scientific laymen.

As a leading Trilobitenexperte he was editor of the trilobite - band of the Treatise on Invertebrate Paleontology.

Awards

Harry Whittington received the 2001 International Prize for Biology and in the same year, the Wollaston Medal. In 2000, he received the Medal of Lapworth Palaeontological Association, whose honorary member he is.