John Phillips

John Phillips was an English geologist born December 25, 1800, in Marden, Wiltshire, England, who died April 24, 1874, at All Souls College, Oxford, and who served as keeper of the Yorkshire Museum from 1826, first assistant secretary of the British Association for the Advancement of Science from 1832 to 1859, professor of geology at King College London from 1834, professor of geology at Trinity College Dublin from 1844, reader in geology at Oxford University succeeding Hugh Edwin Strickland, and keeper of the Ashmolean Museum from 1854 to 1870. In 1841 he published the first global geologic time scale correlating fossils across rock strata and coined the term Mesozoic for one of its divisions, and late in his career he also conducted astronomical observations of Mars in 1862. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1834, served as president of the Geological Society of London from 1859 to 1860 and of the British Association in 1865, and received the Wollaston Medal in 1845.