William Lonsdale

William Lonsdale was an English geologist and palaeontologist born September 9, 1794, in Bath, Somerset, England, who died November 11, 1871, in Bristol, and who served as an ensign in the 4th Regiment during the Peninsular War and at the Battle of Waterloo before leaving the military to become the first honorary curator of natural history at Bath Literary and Scientific Institution and, from 1829 to 1842, assistant secretary and curator of the Geological Society of London. He became the leading English authority on fossil corals, describing specimens from Tertiary, Cretaceous and older British and Russian strata, and in 1837 he proposed that the limestones of South Devon represented an age intermediate between the Carboniferous and Silurian systems, a suggestion that became the foundation for the later established Devonian system. He received the Wollaston Medal in 1846 for his research on fossil corals.