Charles Lapworth

English geologist (1842-1920) who used index fossils, especially graptolites, to show that rock sequences in the Southern Uplands of Scotland long assumed to be a single thick Silurian succession were in fact a much thinner sequence repeated by folding and faulting. On this evidence he proposed the Ordovician as a distinct geological period lying between the Cambrian and Silurian, a division still used on the geologic time scale. He held the first chair of geology at Mason Science College, later the University of Birmingham, from 1881, and received the Bigsby Medal in 1887, the Royal Medal in 1891 and the Wollaston Medal in 1899. A general profile of the same person is also carried in the science atlas.