The Times/1915/Obituary/Richard Lydekker

The death has taken place at Harpenden of Mr. Richard Lydekker, F.R.S., F.G.S., and F.Z.S., well-known as a naturalist and geologist.

He was born in 1849 and educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he took second place in the first class Natural Science Tripos of 1871, and joined the staff of the Geological Survey of India three years later. Carefully exploring the mountains north and south of the Kashmir Valley in 1877, he established the fact that the Kashmir area, is a compressed synclinal ellipse, on the pattern of the larger features defined by Stolicka in the Tibetan region, but containing no rocks younger than the trias. His keen biological bent found scope when the Survey collections in Calcutta were transferred to the newly-built Indian Society of Bengal. He undertook the arrangement and description of the extensive series of tertiary vertebrate fossils, to which large additions had recently come from the Punjab. He retired in 1882, but left behind an enduring record of is zeal and ability in his description of the fauna of the Siwaliks in the "Palæontologia in Indica."

Mr. Lyddekker's scientific activities were maintained unwearyingly through the latter half of his life. He catalogued in 10 volumes the fossil mammals, reptiles, and birds in the British Museum; he collaborated with the late Sir W. H. Flower in "The Royal Natural History" (eight volumes), and with the late Professor H. A. Nicholson in "A Manual of Palæontology" (two volumes), and he contributed three numbers to Allen's Naturalists' Library and many articles to the "Encyclopædia Britannica." He wrote a great number of learned monographs, but did not neglect appeal to the sportsman and the general reader, as is shown by such works as "The Great and Small Game of India, Burma, and Tibet," "Phases of Animal Life," and "The Sportsman's British Birds."

He married in 1882 the eldest daughter of Canon O. W. Davys, and had a family of two sons and three daughters.