science · 13 October 1820 · 204 years ago
birth
Born 13 Oct 1820; died 19 Nov 1899 at age 79.
Canadian geologist who made numerous contributions to paleobotany and extended the knowledge of Canadian geology. Dawson was born and raised in Pictou, Nova Scotia, where the many sandstone and coal formations provided fertile ground for his boyhood interest. Often fossil leaves could be found while gathering shale to make slate pencils. Thus, as a boy, he developed an incurable interest in geology and was an avid collector of local fossils. His working life began with mining companies and doing field work. He studied the geology of Nova Scotia, with a particular interest in the fossil forests of the coal-bearing strata. During his early scientific explorations, which culminated in the publication of Acadian Geology, he made many important discoveries of fossil life, great and small. These included fossil plants, trackways of lowly invertebrates, footprints, skeletons of reptiles and amphibians, millipedes and the earliest land snails. Dawson discovered the oldest land plant known at the time, Psilophyton (1859), from Devonian rocks (dating from 408 - 360 million years ago). In Air Breathers of the Coal Period (1863) he described newly discovered fossil animals He had an uncanny ability to understand the ancient environments in which rocks had formed and to decipher their correct ages. Dawson's energetically promoted scientific institutions in Canada, though he opposed Darwin's evolutionary theories.
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