Lecture Notes on Vertebrate Zoology

There are five notebooks of lecture-notes, entitled: Monotremata; Marsupialia; Insectivora; Gen.Anat.; Brain; and Foramina. Each contains notes and sketches made for his lectures to students in vertebrate zoology at the University of Cambridge.

Clive Forster-Cooper (1880-1947) was born in Hampstead, London on 3 April 1880. He studied zoology, physiology and geology at Trinity College, Cambridge from 1897. He then joined John Stanley Gardiner in an expedition to the maldives 1899-1900. He completed his studies at the University of Cambridge in 1901. He was naturalist to the International North Seas Fisheries Commission 1902-1903. In 1905 he joined the Percy Sladen expedition to the Indian Ocean under Stanley Gardiner. Forster-Cooper became interested in fossil mammals in 1907 and he joined an expedition led by C.W. Andrews of the British Museum to Fayum. He then spent a year in USA to study fossil material in museums. He went on expeditions to Baluchistan in 1910 and 1911. During the 1914-1918 war he worked on the action of quinine on malaria. In 1914, Forster-Cooper was appointed as Superintendent of the University Museum of Zoology, Cambridge, which post he held until 1938. He also taught in the Zoological Laboratory as Lecturer and from 1935 as Reader in Vertebrata. He became Director of the British Museum (Natural History) in London in 1938, which post he held until his death on 23 August 1947 at the age of 67.

Manuscripts can be consulted on appointment only. The Museum of Zoology is open Monday to Friday 9:00 am to 17:00 pm. Access and reproduction is at the discretion of the Archivist.

Description compiled by Kees Rookmaaker, Archives Hub project archivist. The biography is based on one by D.M.S. watson in Obituary Notices of the Royal Society, vol. 7 (1951), pp. 83-93.

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