Great Geologists | 99
It is very doubtful if today any geologist would attempt single-
handedly to write a book entitled “Jurassic Geology of the World”,
but in 1956 just such a book appeared authored by William
Jocelyn Arkell. Arkell was one of the great stratigraphic geologists
and paleontologists of the 20th century, although his scientific
contributions encompassed a variety of geological subjects. He was
a prolific author. A list of his publications includes around 150 articles
and several important books, memoirs and explanatory notes to
geological maps. This is all the more remarkable given that he suffered
ill health for much of his life and during his career he mostly occupied
unsalaried research positions.
William Jocelyn Arkell in 1947. Photographed
by Walter Stoneman and reproduced with
permission under licence from The Royal
Society.
William
Jocelyn
Arkell
He was born in June 1904 in Wiltshire in southern England. His
father was a partner in the local brewing company (Arkell’s – still
in existence) and income from the brewery was to fund William’s
lifelong geological research activities. In 1922 he entered at New
College,Oxford University and obtained a 1st Class Honours degree
in Geology in 1925. Family holidays spent at Swanage on the Dorset
coast had infected him with an enthusiasm for geology and for
Jurassic rocks and fossils in particular. This quickly became a research
theme for him as he stayed on at Oxford to obtain his doctorate.
The Oxfordian (‘Corallian’) succession around Oxford and south into
Wiltshire and Dorset was his initial research topic but he quickly
expanded his interests to include the entire Jurassic of the UK. This
culminated in the publication in 1933 of his superb synthesis “The
Jurassic System in Great Britain”. This 681 page work with copious
illustrations was a remarkable achievement for a young man still in his
twenties and remains a valuable reference work today.
Coherent synthesis is a skill often undervalued in scientific writing,
but was one at which Arkell excelled culminating in Jurassic Geology
of the World. In The Jurassic System in Great Britain, building on the
work of William Smith, Alcide d’Orbigny and the other early pioneers
of stratigraphic classification and correlation, he not only described
the British Jurassic stratigraphic units and their characteristic fossil
content, but also reviewed the importance of biozones and their
definition, a topic he was to return to a number of times in his
career. He also linked tectonics to stratigraphy and their influence on
palaeogeography. This was truly a modern synthesis and one which
established his international reputation.
In the 1930s Arkell continued to be based at New College, Oxford
with minimal teaching and administration duties (not unreasonable
given he received no salary!) allowing maximum time for research.
This resulted in a stream of important publications, including a growing
interest in Jurassic ammonites, especially their taxonomy, phylogeny
and value in correlation. At the same time, he was interested in the