Robert Alfred Cloynes Godwin-Austen

Robert Alfred Cloyne Godwin-Austen FRS (17 March 1808 – 25 November 1884) was an English geologist.

Godwin-Austen was the eldest son of Sir Henry E. Austen. He was educated at Oriel College, Oxford, of which he became a fellow in 1830. He afterwards entered Lincoln's Inn. In 1833 he married the only daughter and heiress of Major General Sir Henry Godwin KCB, and in 1854 he took the additional name of Godwin by Royal licence. At Oxford as a pupil of William Buckland he became deeply interested in geology. Soon afterwards he met and was inspired by Henry De la Beche and assisted him by making a geological map of the neighbourhood of Newton Abbot in Devon, which was embodied in the Geological Survey map. He also published an elaborate memoir On the Geology of the South-East of Devonshire (Trans. Geol. Soc. ser. 2, vol. viii.).

His attention was next directed to the Cretaceous rocks of Surrey, his home county - his estates being situated at Chilworth and Shalford near Guildford. Later he dealt with the superficial deposits bordering the English Channel, and with the erratic boulders of Selsey. In 1855 he brought before the Geological Society of London his paper On the possible Extension of the Coal-Measures beneath the South-Eastern part of England, in which he pointed out on well-considered theoretical grounds the likelihood of coal measures being some day reached in that area. In this article he also advocated the freshwater origin of the Old Red Sandstone, and discussed the relations of that formation, and of the Devonian, to the Silurian and Carboniferous.

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