Robert Alfred Cloyne Godwin-Austen

Robert Alfred Cloyne Godwin-Austen was an English geologist born March 17, 1808, who died November 25, 1884, and who studied at Oriel College, Oxford, under William Buckland, becoming a fellow there in 1830 before training at Lincoln Inn; he adopted the Godwin surname by royal licence in 1854 after his 1833 marriage to the daughter of Major General Sir Henry Godwin. He conducted geological surveys of Devon and Surrey, examined Cretaceous rocks and superficial deposits along the English Channel, studied erratic boulders near Selsey, and in an 1855 presentation argued on theoretical grounds for the likelihood that coal measures would eventually be found beneath southeastern England; he also completed Edward Forbes unfinished Natural History of the European Seas in 1859. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1849 and received the Wollaston Medal in 1862, with Roderick Murchison praising him as pre-eminently the physical geographer of bygone periods; his son Henry Haversham Godwin-Austen also became a geologist.