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blue plaque · Scotland

Charles Lapworth

Photograph at the Charles Lapworth blue plaque

Charles Lapworth, LLD, FRS, 1842-1920. Between 1875 and 1881 Lapworth was a teacher of English at Madras College. In his spare time he studied the rocks of Southern Scotland and used the detailed differences of extinct creatures called graptolites to help unravel the complexities of these ancient rocks. As a result of his careful studies, he propsed a new division of Geological Time, the Ordovician Period, that is no recognised and used internationally. He also correctly interpreted the Moine-Thrust Fault Zone in the N.W. Highlands of Scotland as a mass of older rocks pushed over younger ones, an idea which at the time conflicted with orthodoxy. He left St. Andrews in 1881 to become Professor of Geology at the University of Birmingham.

Inscription drawn from imported open data, awaiting original TributeLegacy editorial.

Source: Open Plaques. Geographic data via OpenStreetMap.

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Location records are drawn from open, licence-clean datasets, kept here with attribution and gratitude to the people who maintain them.

  • Open Plaques, dedicated to the public domain (CC0). See openplaques.org.
  • Wikidata, available under the CC0 1.0 Universal dedication.
  • © OpenStreetMap contributors, available under the Open Database Licence.
  • Historic England, National Heritage List for England, used under the Open Government Licence v3.0. War memorial records are drawn from open community datasets (OpenStreetMap, Wikidata, NHLE) — never from the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, which is excluded.

Editorial descriptions, photography and tribute links are original TributeLegacy work, layered on top of the open data.

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