Clive Forster Cooper
| Clive Forster-Cooper | |
|---|---|
| Born |
April 3, 1880 London |
| Died | August 23, 1947 (aged 67) |
| Nationality | British |
| Fields | Palaeontology |
| Alma mater | Trinity College, Cambridge |
Sir Clive Forster Cooper, FRS (3 April 1880 – 23 August 1947) was an English palaeontologist and Director of the Cambridge University Museum of Zoology and Natural History Museum in London. He was the first to describe Paraceratherium, also commonly known as Indricotherium or Baluchitherium, the largest known land mammal.
He was born on 3 April 1880 in Hampstead, London, the second child and only son of John Forster Cooper and his wife Mary Emily Miley. His maternal grandfather, Miles Miley, was an amateur botanist and naturalist, and encouraged Clive Forster-Cooper in his interest in natural history. He was educated at Summer Fields School, Oxford, Rugby School. In 1897 he went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, and took a BA in 1901 and MA in 1904.
In 1900, Forster Cooper travelled with John Stanley Gardiner to the Maldive and Laccadive Islands to undertake collections and study the formation of coral reefs. From 1902 to 1903 he was naturalist to the North Seas Fisheries Commission Scientific Investigations, sailing around the Indian Ocean, taking soundings and collecting fauna and flora of the Seychelles. In 1905 Forster-Cooper joined the Percy Sladen expedition to the Indian Ocean, with Stanley Gardiner. In 1906, he returned to Cambridge and continued to work on the collections made on the expeditions to the Indian Ocean. In 1907 he met Dr C. W. Andrews, a specialist in the history of the elephant, at the British Museum of Natural History and became interested in fossil mammals. As a result of this meeting, in 1907 he joined Dr Andrews' collecting expedition to the Fayum. His increasing interest in vertebrate palaeontology led him to the American Museum of Natural History, New York, where he worked under H. F. Osborn, then Professor of Zoology at Columbia University and Curator of the museum. He spent a year in America working closely Osborn, Matthew, Walter W. Granger and W. K. Gregory, studying the American collections of fossil mammals, and taking part in one of Granger's collecting expeditions to Wyoming.
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