Searles Valentine Wood

Searles Valentine Wood was an English palaeontologist born February 14, 1798, who died October 26, 1880, at Martlesham, near Woodbridge, England, and who served as a midshipman in the British East India Company from 1811 to 1826 before settling in Hasketon, Suffolk, to study fossil mollusks from the geological deposits of East Anglia. His principal scholarly contribution was A Monograph of the Crag Mollusca, published between 1848 and 1856 and examining the shelly sand deposits then quarried for fertilizer, and he collaborated with Frederick Edwards on A Monograph of the Eocene Bivalves of England between 1861 and 1871, later adding three supplementary volumes to his Crag work in 1872 to 1874, 1879 and 1882. He received the Wollaston Medal in 1860 for his research on mollusks; his son, also named Searles Valentine Wood, was a solicitor who separately pursued geology specializing in glacial deposits.