Sir Clive Forster Cooper, FRS (3 April 1880 - 23 August 1947)[1] was an English paleontologist. He was the first to describe Paraceratherium, the largest known land mammal.
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He was born in London, the son of John Forster Cooper and Mary Emily Miley, and educated at Summer Fields School, Oxford, Rugby School.[2] In 1897 he went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he gained his BA in 1901 and his MA in 1904.[3]
Forster Cooper was a member of expeditions in 1900 to the Maldive and Laccadive Islands. From 1902 to 1903 he was naturalist to the North Seas Fisheries Commission Scientific Investigations, before joining expeditions to the Seychelles, Fayum and Baluchistan. In 1914, he was appointed Director of Cambridge's University Museum of Zoology, remaining there until 1937. During the First World War, he was busy with government war research on malaria. At Cambridge, he was also Reader in the Vertebrata and a Fellow of Trinity Hall.[2]
Forster-Cooper was Director of the Natural History Museum in London from 1938 to 1947.[2]
In 1912, Forster Cooper married Rosalie, a daughter of R. Tunstall-Smith, of Baltimore, Maryland, USA, and they had two sons and one daughter.[2] He was knighted in 1946 and died on 23 August 1947.[2]