Randolph Kirkpatrick

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Cover of The Nummulosphere, 1912

Randolph Kirkpatrick (1863 – 1950) was a British spongiologist, cnidariologist and bryozoologist. He was assistant keeper of lower invertebrates at the British Natural History Museum from 1886 until his retirement in 1927.

Kirkpatrick published a limited number of papers on the sponges of Antarctica and the Indian Ocean. However, his most significant work was carried out on Merlia, a species of coralline sponge (a sponge which secretes a coral-like limestone skeleton). He was the first to correctly interpret these unusual sponges, but his work was largely ignored until the 1960s when W.D. Hartman and T.F. Goreau rediscovered the coralline sponges.

It is possible that his important work on the coralline sponges was dismissed by his contemporaries due to his having published a book containing unconventional ideas about the history of life on earth. This was the self-published The Nummulosphere: an account of the Organic Origin of so-called Igneous Rocks and Abyssal Red Clays (1912), printed by Lamley & Co. of South Kensington. His book proposed the unusual theory that all rocks had been formed by the accumulation of forams such as nummulites^[1].

Kilpatrick also identified and named the mollusc Pickworthia kirkpatricki Iredale, 1917 (now in the genus Sansonia Jousseaume, 1892)^[2].