Charles Lapworth
| Charles Lapworth | |
|---|---|
 |
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| Born |
20 September 1842 Faringdon, Berkshire, England |
| Died | 13 March 1920 (aged 77) Birmingham, England |
| Awards |
Bigsby Medal (1887) Royal Medal (1891) Wollaston Medal (1899) |
Charles Lapworth, FRS, FGS (20 September 1842 – 13 March 1920) was an English geologist who pioneered faunal analysis using index fossils and identified the Ordovician period.
Charles Lapworth was born at Faringdon in Berkshire (now Oxfordshire) and educated as a teacher at the Culham Diocesan Training College near Abingdon, Oxfordshire. He moved to the Scottish border region, where he investigated the previously little-known fossil fauna of the area. There in 1869 he married Janet, daughter of Galashiels schoolmaster Walter Sanderson and stayed in the area. Eventually, through patient mapping and innovative use of index fossil analysis, Lapworth showed that what was thought to be a thick sequence of Silurian rocks was in fact a much thinner series of rocks repeated by faulting and folding.
He completed this pioneering research in the Southern Uplands while employed as a schoolmaster for 11 years at the Episcopal Church school, Galashiels. He then studied geology and became in 1875 an assistant at Madras College in St Andrews, Fife, and then in 1881 the first professor of geology at Mason Science College, later the University of Birmingham, where he taught until his retirement.
He is best known for pioneering faunal analysis of Silurian beds by means of index fossils, especially graptolites, and his proposal (eventually adopted) that the beds between the Cambrian beds of north Wales and the Silurian beds of South Wales should be assigned to a new geological period: the Ordovician. This proposal resolved a long running controversy which began when Roderick Murchison and Adam Sedgwick argued over the relative ages of the strata in question. Lapworth received numerous awards for his research work, while for teaching he used the English Midlands as a setting for demonstrating the fieldwork techniques he had pioneered in his own research.
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