author
R. (Randolph) Kirkpatrick
1863–1950
Best known as a British naturalist who spent decades at the Natural History Museum, he wrote on sponges, corals, and other marine invertebrates—and also became remembered for a highly unusual geological theory in The Nummulosphere. His work sits at an interesting crossroads of careful museum science and bold speculation.
1 Audiobook
A guide to the shell and starfish galleries : (Mollusca, Polyzoa, Brachiopoda, Tunicata, Echinoderma, and Worms)
by British Museum (Natural History). Department of Zoology, F. J. (Francis Jeffrey) Bell, R. (Randolph) Kirkpatrick, E. A. (Edgar Albert) Smith
About the author
Born in Wigtown, Scotland, in 1863, Randolph Kirkpatrick built his career around the study of marine life. He became assistant keeper of lower invertebrates at the British Museum (Natural History), later the Natural History Museum, and worked there from 1886 until his retirement in 1927.
He is chiefly associated with research on sponges, cnidarians, and bryozoans, and published studies on material from places including Antarctica and the Indian Ocean. Although he produced a relatively small body of scientific papers, he earned a place in specialist natural history for his work on these lesser-known marine groups.
Kirkpatrick is also remembered for The Nummulosphere: An Account of the Organic Origin of So-Called Igneous Rocks and Abyssal Red Clays (1912), a book that proposed an unconventional explanation for the Earth's rocks. That idea did not become accepted science, but it has helped keep his name alive as an example of a researcher whose curiosity ranged far beyond his main field.