Awards

Marsh Palaeontology Award

The Marsh Award for Palaeontology aims to recognise living individuals (or groups of individuals) - based in the UK - who have made a significant contribution to the field of palaeontology. The purpose of the Marsh Award for Palaeontology is to recognise those who have contributed significant work to the field, yet whose efforts have not necessarily been widely recognised to date. Those nominated for the award can be of either amateur or professional status.


The 2009 winner is Stan Wood

Stan Wood has over the course of the last 40 years contributed more than any other single person to the discovery and collection of Palaeozoic vertebrate, arthropod and plant fossils in the United Kingdom. Through his commitment and insight he has single-handedly renewed interest in the potential of Scotland for providing crucial discoveries from this formative period in evolutionary history during which life of land was first established. Stan has achieved all this by sheer hard work, instinct, research, persistence, and contacts with the relevant people, and has found research-quality material where others have failed to find anything at all. Furthermore, whereas other collectors have found the odd specimen, Stan has found whole new sites that have yielded not just the fossils but highly important contextual information for the Carboniferous Period, between 350 – 300 million years ago. His material has enhanced the collections of major UK museums, principally the National Museums of Scotland but also the Hunterian Museum, Glasgow, the Natural History Museum and the Univerity Museum of Zoology, Cambridge and provided material for studies on Early Carboniferous tetrapods, lungfishes and sarcopterygians, Palaeozoic arthropods, palaeobotany, sedimentology and geochemistry. Stan has provided research material for three generations of scientists and his collecting efforts have particularly benefited young palaeontologists at the beginning of their careers who have been able to study new and undescribed fossils that change the way we think about the history of life on Earth.

The results of Stan’s careful dedicated and systematic fieldwork have completely revolutionised our knowledge of Carboniferous ecosystems. One of his most exciting discoveries at East Kirkton Quarry at Bathgate near Edinburgh yielded the earliest know terrestrial tetrapods and arthropods as well as new plants. The subsequent research programme was a major milestone in our understanding of the morphology, palaeobiology and evolution of the earliest known community of land dwelling vertebrates. Although Stan has ‘officially’ retired, he continues his fossil hunting activities and has recently made exciting new discoveries in the Scottish borders that bridge a world-wide gap in the fossil record of early tetrapods and arthropods at the beginning of the Carboniferous Period that will provide exciting new insights into the early evolution of four-legged animals on land.

Email:



Partner:

The Natural History Museum
Cromwell Road
London
SW7 5BD

www.nhm.ac.uk

Previous Winners:

2008 - Mr J Collins