Roger Mason (geologist)

Roger Mason (born 4 May 1941) is an English geologist. He is known as the discoverer of Ediacaran fossils. He is now a professor at the China University of Geosciences at Wuhan.

Mason grew up in the English Midlands city of Leicester, where he attended Wyggeston Boys Grammar School. In April 1957, while rock climbing with friends in Charnwood Forest in Leicestershire, he spotted what looked like a leaf embedded in the rock. Mason took a rubbing of the rock. He showed the rubbing to his father, the minister of Leicester's Great Meeting Unitarian Chapel, who also taught at the local university and knew Trevor Ford, a geologist there. Mason took Ford to the site; Ford wrote up the discovery in the Journal of the Yorkshire Geological Society. Ford identified it as a Precambrian fossil and named it Charnia masoni after the forest and Mason. Mason credits this first step in his geological career to "[his] father’s encouragement and the enquiring approach fostered by [his] science teachers".

The holotype (the actual physical example from which the species was first described) now resides, along with a cast of its sister taxon Charniodiscus, in New Walk Museum & Art Gallery, Leicester. Decades later it came to light that Tina Negus, then a 15-year-old schoolgirl, had seen this fossil a year before the boys but her geography schoolteacher discounted the possibility of Precambrian fossils. Mason acknowledges, and the museum's Charnia display explains, that the fossil had been discovered a year earlier by Negus, "but no one took her seriously". She was recognised at the 50th anniversary celebrations of the official discovery.

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