Charles Lapworth

Charles Lapworth FRS FGS (20 September 1842 – 13 March 1920) was a headteacher and an English geologist who pioneered faunal analysis using index fossils and identified the Ordovician period.

Charles Lapworth was born at Faringdon in Berkshire (now Oxfordshire) the son of James Lapworth.

He trained as a teacher at the Culham Diocesan Training College near Abingdon, Oxfordshire. He moved to the Scottish border region, where he investigated the previously little-known fossil fauna of the area. He was headmaster of the school in Galashiels from 1864 to 1875. In 1869 he married Janet, daughter of Galashiels schoolmaster Walter Sanderson.

Through mapping and innovative use of index fossil analysis, based on a sequence exposed at Dob's Linn, Lapworth showed that what was thought to be a thick sequence of Silurian rocks was in fact a much thinner series of rocks repeated by faulting and folding.

He completed this pioneering research in the Southern Uplands while employed as a schoolmaster for 11 years at the Episcopal Church school, Galashiels. He then studied geology and became in 1875 an assistant at Madras College in St Andrews, Fife, and then in 1881 the first professor of geology at Mason Science College, later the University of Birmingham, where he taught until his retirement in 1913.

He is best known for pioneering faunal analysis of Silurian beds by means of index fossils, especially graptolites, and his proposal (eventually adopted) that the beds between the Cambrian beds of north Wales and the Silurian beds of South Wales should be assigned to a new geological period: the Ordovician. He resolved the long running "Highlands Controversy. Lapworth received numerous awards for his research work, while for teaching he used the English Midlands as a setting for demonstrating the fieldwork techniques he had pioneered in his own research.

Following his researches in the Southern Uplands Charles Lapworth also devoted time to mapping near Durness in Scotland's northwest highlands and was first to propose the controversial theory that here older rocks were found lying above younger, suggesting complex folding or faulting as a cause. Later Peach and Horne were dispatched to the area and their monumental memoir proved Lapworth correct. In the English Midlands he carried out important work in Shropshire, in particular identifying fossils of Olenelloid trilobites of Cambrian age, demonstrating that Cambrian rocks underlay the Carboniferous rocks between Nuneaton and Atherstone, and suggesting a pre-Cambrian date for the Longmyndian rocks that underlay them. He extrapolated these findings to the N.W. Highlands of Scotland, suggesting that the Torridonian sandstone might correspond to the Longmyndian rocks, and thus be pre-Cambrian rather than Cambrian, and that the Durness-Eriboll series, overlaying the Torridonian, would be of Cambrian age rather than Silurian. Again Peach and Horne, surveying in Dundonnell Forest, confirmed Lapworths's suggestion, finding Olenelloid fossils in the fucoid beds of the Durness-Eriboll series. For a modern account and discussion of the elucidation of the geology of the N.W. Highlands, see Oldroyd (1990).

He died on 13 March 1920 and is buried in Lodge Hill Cemetery near Birmingham.