The Fossil Collections of Sir Richard John Griffith (1784–1878)

By Nigel T. Monaghan
Published in Irish Journal of Earth Sciences, 2025.
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Abstract

Sir Richard John Griffith was the acknowledged ‘father of Irish geology’ and his fossil collection was without doubt the single most valuable and important Irish palaeontological collection to be assembled by any individual in the nineteenth century. Being one of the earliest collections to be used for systematic descriptions of Paleozoic fossils it held the type material for over five hundred species and twenty-eight genera that were new to science. The original work on the collection was by Frederick McCoy who produced two volumes describing the collection in 1844 and 1846. Most surviving specimens are in the National Museum of Ireland – Natural History, with other important holdings in the Sedgwick Museum in Cambridge, and Trinity College Dublin.