Errol Ivor White, 30 June 1901 - 11 January 1985

Errol Ivor White, a former Keeper of Palaeontology at the British Museum (Natural History), was for over sixty years an outstanding research worker studying all groups of fossil fishes, especially those found in the Old Red Sandstone and late Silurian strata. By using chemical solution techniques, he added anatomical knowledge to the substantial morphological and taxonomic knowledge he had obtained of some of the fishes he studied. Like his predecessor, Sir Arthur Smith Woodward, F.R.S., White made sterling efforts to make the Museum’s collections representative of every world-important fauna or flora. By his own physical labours in Madagascar, Spitsbergen, the Welsh border counties and South Wales, he contributed to that aim; his published studies ranged over all fish-bearing geological systems and they touched on each of the continents. In the realms of natural philosophy, whereas White accepted that, through time, organisms show a succession of creatures of increasingly modern aspect, from his work on fossil fishes he found that direct linkages between the fish groups were missing or faulty (115)*. In the later years of his Keepership he initiated the creation of an adjunct to the Museum building to provide for the enlarged collections and increased staff; also he sought and gained financial approval for the modernization of the display in the Museum’s fossil mammal gallery. * Numbers given in this form refer to entries in the bibliography at the end of the text.