Thomas Wright

Thomas Wright (1809-1884), British palaeontologist, was born at Paisley in Renfrewshire on the 9th of November 1809. He studied at the Royal College of Surgeons in Dublin, and qualified as a doctor in 1832. Soon afterwards he settled at Cheltenham, and graduated M.D. at St Andrews in 1846. He devoted his leisure to geological pursuits, became an active member of the Cotteswold Naturalists' Club (founded in 1846), and gathered a fine collection of Jurassic ammonites and echinoderms. He contributed to the Palaeontographical Society monographs on the British fossil Echinodermata from the Oolitic and Cretaceous formations (1855-1882); he also began (1878) a monograph on the Lias ammonites of the British Islands, of which the last part was issued in 1885, after his death. He wrote many papers in the Ann. and Mag. Nat. Hist. and Proc. Cotteswold Club. The Wollaston medal was awarded to him by the Geological Society of London in 1878, and he was elected F.R.S. in 1879. He died at Cheltenham on the 17th of November 1884.