Title: Alwyn Williams
This just in from Robin Cocks.
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Alwyn Williams died peacefully of cancer on 4th April at Glasgow,
aged 82.
He was a giant amongst brachiopod workers, being not only the editor
and first author of the first brachiopod Treatise on Invertebrate
Palaeontology (two volumes) in 1965, but fulfilled the same roles
in the second edition: four volumes of which have been published (1997
to 2003), and there are another two in press. He successfully
organised contributions from 43 co-authors for the second edition, an
enormous political challenge which he tackled with a characteristic
mixture of charm, terror and efficiency.
But the originality of his brachiopod work was also outstanding;
he was the first to evaluate shell structure across the whole phylum
through pioneer electron microscopy; he was amongst the first to
undertake DNA studies; over his long career he published and refined
many times the overall classification of the Brachiopoda, with the end
product of a robust and well-known phylogeny that will probably
require little future change.
His systematic work, although originally on Silurian faunas (he was
the first to recognise and document the evolution of Stricklandia, a
key zonal fossil) was chiefly concerned with the Ordovician. His
substantial and painstaking memoirs and monographs on the Ordovician
brachiopods of central and northern Wales, Shropshire, and Girvan, as
well as many smaller papers, will stand for a long time. For many of
these areas he also remapped the often difficult geology, and
published correlation data. He was the lead author of the 1973
Ordovician correlation chart of Britain and Ireland, and the first
Chairman of the IUGS Ordovician Subcommission. He had many prizes,
including the Murchison Medal of The Geological Society of London, and
was a Fellow of the Royal Society. He was also knighted.
He was head of the Geology Department at Queen's University,
Belfast, for nearly 20 years, then moved on to be Head of Geology at
Birmingham in 1973, from which he went to become Principal of Glasgow
University, a job that for any normal person would have meant the
cessation of geological research. Alwyn was not a normal person. He
will be much missed.
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Dr. Norman MacLeod
Keeper of Palaeontology
The Natural History Museum,
Cromwell Road, London, SW7 5BD
(0)20-7942-5204 (Office)
(0)20-7942-5546 (Fax)
http://www.nhm.ac.uk/palaeontology/a&ss/nm/nm.html (Web Page)
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