Alan J. Charig | |
---|---|
Born |
England |
1 July 1927
Died | 15 July 1997 England |
(aged 70)
Nationality | British |
Fields | Palaeontology |
Alan Jack Charig (1 July 1927 – 15 July 1997) was an English palaeontologist and writer who popularised his subject on television and in books at the start of the wave of interest in dinosaurs in the 1970s.
Charig was, though, first and foremost a research scientist in the Department of Palaeontology at the Natural History Museum, London. There he worked on dinosaurs and their immediate Triassic ancestors, but also studied creatures as varied as limbless amphisbaenians (worm-lizards) and a Fijian gastropod, Thatcheria.
Charig was educated at The Haberdashers' Aske's Boys' School, an independent school in Elstree in Hertfordshire and Emmanuel College at the University of Cambridge. His university education was interrupted by National Service in the Royal Armoured Corps, first as a tank driver and, after volunteering for an Inter-Services Russian language course at Cambridge, as a Russian interpreter in Germany, from 1946 to 1948.
On graduating in Zoology in 1951, Charig took a doctorate at Cambridge, supervised by the late Francis Rex Parrington. His subject was Triassic archosaurs of Tanganyika.