(1792 - 1871)
Born into a wealthy Scottish family, he was sent to military college and fought in the Peninsular War, before peace in 1815 ended his military ambitions. Aged 29 he gave up his obsession with fox-hunting to take up science. Encouraged by the eccentric Dr. William Buckland, he was soon an active member of the London Geological Society. He made geological tours of Scotland and continental Europe, conducted 'at a furious pace', accompanied by his wife who made drawings of the fossils collected. Within eight years he became President of the Geological Society.
Murchison was one of the first to study Scotland's fossil fish and bring them to the attention of other geologists including Agassiz. Together with Adam Sedgwick (professor of geology at Cambridge), he named and described the Devonian system of rocks in 1839, showing that the Old Red Sandstone was a system in its own right. His novel research on the Silurian system and the Permian rocks of Russia were his most important contributions to geology, earning him the nickname 'Count Siluria'. In 1858, while Director General of the Geological Survey, he took part in the celebrated expedition to Dura Den.
Always in the public eye, Murchison represented the 'official' voice of geology to the layman. Though accused of snobbishness, he was able to use his aristocratic contacts in the advancement of science. He was privately sceptical about Darwinism.