Thomas Davidson (palaeontologist)

Thomas Davidson ( born May 17, 1817 in Edinburgh, † October 14, 1885 in Brighton ) was a Scottish paleontologist.

Thomas Davidson was the son of wealthy parents; they possessed considerable lands in Midlothian. He received his education partly at the University of Edinburgh and partly in France, Italy and Switzerland. He developed an early interest in natural history subjects, and benefited in dealing with foreign languages ​​, literature and scholars of foreign countries very different from the experience gained during his education.

Under the influence of Leopold von Buch in 1837, he turned his interest to the group of brachiopods, for which he was in the course of time the leading authority. The monograph Monograph of British Fossil Brachiopoda, published by the Society Palaeontographical, became his life's work. Between 1850 and 1886 six quarto volumes and its attachments have been published, containing more than 200 self- lithographed by Davidson boards. He also wrote an extensive work on today living brachiopods. The book Recent Brachiopoda published by the Linnean Society.

In 1857 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, and received in 1865 the Wollaston Medal of the Geological Society of London. 1870 awarded him the Royal Society, the Royal Medal, and 1882 to him by the University of St. Andrews degree of Legum Doctor ( LL.D. ) was conferred.

Davidson died in Brighton on 14 October 1885 and left his extensive collection of fossil and recent brachiopods to the British Museum.

A biography with a portrait and a catalog raisonné was published in the Geological Magazine for 1871, p 145