David Meredith Seares Watson

David Meredith Seares Watson, known as D. M. S. Watson, was an English zoologist and paleontologist born June 18, 1886, in Higher Broughton, Salford, Lancashire, England, who died July 23, 1973, in Midhurst, Surrey, England, and who served as Jodrell Professor of Zoology and Comparative Anatomy at University College London from 1921 to 1951, also curating the college Grant Museum of Zoology. His research centered on vertebrate paleontology, fossil reptiles, and fossil plants, and early in his career he published significant work on coal balls with the paleobotanist Marie Stopes. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1922, an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh from 1949, received the Mary Clark Thompson Medal in 1941, the Darwin-Wallace Medal in 1958, and the Wollaston Medal in 1965; the fossil fish genera Watsonichthys and Watsonulus are named in his honor.