Roger Mason (geologist)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Roger Mason (born 1940) is an English geologist. He was the discoverer of Ediacaran fossils. He is now a professor at the China University of Geosciences at Wuhan.

Mason grew up in the British Midlands city of Leicester, where he attended Wyggeston Boys Grammar School. In April 1957, while rock climbing with friends in Charnwood Forest in Leicestershire, he spotted what looked like a leaf embedded in the rock. He asked Trevor D. Ford of the University of Leicester to examine it. Ford identified it as a Precambrian fossil and named it Charnia masoni after the forest and Mason.

Mason's discovery was mentioned on the February 2009 David Attenborough documentary Charles Darwin and the Tree of Life, and again in Attenborough's 2010 series First Life and the documentary that accompanied it, Attenborough's Journey. Attenborough, a keen fossil hunter as a boy, mentioned that he attended Wyggeston a few years ahead of Mason, and having been in the same part of Charnwood a few years before Mason, but the prevailing wisdom at the time was that the rocks were too old to bear fossils and so Attenborough did not search them.

References

New Scientist, 14 April 2007, p. 34, "Life's long fuse"

Authority control	VIAF: 72640452 ISNI: 0000 0000 6332 3537 SUDOC: 080461514

Persondata
Name	Mason, Roger
Alternative names
Short description	English geologist
Date of birth	1940
Place of birth
Date of death
Place of death

This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike; additional terms may apply for the media files.