Thomas Davidson

Thomas Davidson was a British palaeontologist born May 17, 1817, in Edinburgh, Scotland, who died October 14, 1885, in Brighton, England, and who studied at the University of Edinburgh and in France, Italy and Switzerland before becoming, from 1837 onward under the influence of Leopold von Buch, the preeminent nineteenth century authority on brachiopods. His major work, the Monograph of British Fossil Brachiopoda, appeared in six quarto volumes with more than two hundred plates he drew himself on stone, published between 1850 and 1886, and he also prepared a comprehensive memoir on living brachiopods for the Linnean Society and catalogued specimens collected by HMS Challenger. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1857, received an LL.D. from the University of St Andrews in 1882 and was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1866, and he received the Wollaston Medal in 1865 and the Royal Medal in 1870.