Alfred Nicholson Leeds
Alfred Nicholson Leeds was an English amateur palaeontologist.
Biography
Leeds was born at Eyebury, Peterborough, the youngest of the eight children of Edward Thurlow Leeds and Eliza Mary Leeds. He was educated at Warwick School. He had wanted to become a doctor, but circumstances meant that from 1868 he had to take on the management of Eyebury Farm as a gentleman farmer.Leeds' elder brother Charles, a student at the University of Oxford, had been encouraged by Professor John Phillips to persevere in collecting fossils from near his home. Alfred joined him in these searches, and between them they developed better methods of disinterring, and of scientifically recording, fossils in soft clay than had been used before. In 1887, Charles emigrated to New Zealand; but Alfred continued to search for fossils, assisted by his wife and by their second son, Edward Thurlow Leeds.
Leeds amassed one of the largest collections of fossil vertebrates in the world. In 1889, his portrait was painted by the 17-year-old William Nicholson. From 1890 onwards, he began to present his most important specimens of Jurassic fossils from the Oxford Clay near Peterborough to the British Museum. He was a Fellow of the Geological Society; in 1893, he was awarded part of its Lyell Fund.
Other museums in the UK and elsewhere hold items from his collection; including the National Museum of Ireland.
An extinct genus of fish, Leedsichthys, and several extinct species have been named in his honour.
Death
Leeds died in Eyebury on 25 August 1917 at the age of 70.Discoveries and honours
- Early 1880she acquired the skeleton of a stegosaur dinosaur found in a brick pit near Eye, Cambridgeshire. In 1887, it was described by John Whitaker Hulke as a new species, Omosaurus durobrivensis. It is now considered to be within the genus Lexovisaurus.
- 1880she collected fossils of a large Mesozoic bony fish, which proved to be from the novel genus Leedsichthys, described and named in his honour by Arthur Smith Woodward in 1889.
- 1887Hulke described a species of sauropod, Ornithopsis leedsii, naming it in his honour. It was renamed Cetiosauriscus leedsi, before being idenitifed as a nomen dubium.
- 1889the type species of a genus of iguanodontian dinosaur was named Camptosaurus leedsi in his honour by Richard Lydekker. It has since been renamed Callovosaurus leedsi,
- 1893Lydekker named the type species of a genus of ankylosaurian ornithischian dinosaur Sarcolestes leedsi in his honour.
- 1901Harry Seeley described a species of stegosaur Omosaurus leedsi, naming it in his honour. The genus has since been renamed Dacentrurus.
- 1907-09he collected a fossil, which in 2013 proved to be the sole species of a geosaurine metriorhynchid crocodyliform known within the genus Tyrannoneustes.