Harry Blackmore Whittington

Harry Blackmore Whittington was a British palaeontologist born March 24, 1916, in Handsworth, England, who died June 20, 2010, in Cambridge, England, and who held the Woodwardian Professorship of Geology at the University of Cambridge from 1966 to 1983. He is renowned for pioneering studies of fossils from the Burgess Shale and Cambrian fauna, work that substantially advanced understanding of the Cambrian Explosion by explaining how modern animal body plans emerged within a concentrated geological timeframe, and he established standards for documenting delicate fossils preserved in specialized deposits, including extensive research on trilobites as the most diversified Cambrian invertebrates. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1971, received the Paleontological Society Medal in 1983, the Lyell Medal in 1986, the Mary Clark Thompson Medal in 1990, the Lapworth Medal in 2000, the International Prize for Biology in 2001, and the Wollaston Medal in 2001.