About the event

William Joscelyn Arkell established an international reputation as the UK’s greatest Jurassic stratigrapher, yet outside the discipline of geology very few people know his name or what his contribution to Mesozoic stratigraphy and palaeontology achieved on both the national and global stage. His reputation was obtained in a very short working career, a little over 30 years, six of which included the events of the Second World War. Arkell was born in the Wiltshire market town of Highworth in 1904 and had an interest in Natural History from a very early age following family holidays in Dorset. On entry into New College Oxford in 1922 he had intended to read entomology tutored by the evolutionary biologist Sir Julian Huxley. Persuaded by Professor William Sollas and Dr Kenneth Sandford that a career in geology and palaeontology would be more productive, he graduated with a BA First Class Honours degree in geology in 1925. Supervised by Dr. J. A. Douglas he was awarded his D. Phil in 1927 and commenced publication of a Palaeontographical Monograph on British Corallian Lamellibranchia (1929-1937).

His synthesis of British Jurassic strata (The Jurassic System in Great Britain) was published in 1933 at the age of 29 and established his international reputation. Numerous publications were produced up to 1940, with only minor delays following his wartime employment as a civil servant. Serious illness in 1943, including hospitalisation and an emergency operation required him to restrict his working hours. Following the war, he accepted a position of a Senior Research Fellow at Trinity College Cambridge, and in 1947 his works Oxford Stone, The Geology of Oxford and the Geological Survey guide to The Geology of the Country around Weymouth, Swanage, Corfe and Lulworth were published. Awards and election to the Royal Society followed, and in 1956 Jurassic Geology of the World was published. He suffered a stroke in 1956 which left him partially paralysed and died without regaining conciseness after a second in 1958.

His legacy includes two further Palaeontographical Monograph’s (Ammonites of the English Corallian Beds, 1934-48; English Bathonian Ammonites, 1951-58), and Part L Mollusca 4, Cephalopoda, Ammonoidea of The Treatise of Invertebrate Palaeontology (1957). He campaigned for an International Commission on the stratigraphy of the Jurassic – an organisation now overseen by the International Commission on Stratigraphy. His legacy is lasting and relevant to today’s geologists, stratigraphers, and palaeontologists.

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