{"id":4559,"date":"2021-01-22T17:10:24","date_gmt":"2021-01-22T17:10:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/cromercrox\/?p=4559"},"modified":"2021-01-22T17:10:24","modified_gmt":"2021-01-22T17:10:24","slug":"brian-g-gardiner-1934-2021","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/cromercrox\/2021\/01\/22\/brian-g-gardiner-1934-2021\/","title":{"rendered":"Brian G. Gardiner (1934-2021)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Just a quick post to announce the death of Professor Brian G. Gardiner<\/a> (1934-2021), communicated to me just now by his son Nick.<\/p>\n

Brian was a specialist in the evolution of fishes. He was the last surviving member of the so-called ‘Gang of Four’ that shook up the staid world of biological taxonomy in the 1980s, with their espousal of Hennig’s then-revolutionary phylogenetic systematics, or cladistics<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The others were his close colleague Colin Patterson<\/a>, his student Peter Forey<\/a>, and their American colleague Donn Rosen<\/a>, and loosely associated with others in the Natural History Museum<\/a> such as Dick Jefferies<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I met Brian when, as an undergraduate, I spent the summer of 1983 in the Fossil Fish Section at the Natural History Museum, working under Forey and Patterson. I narrowly escaped doing a Ph.D. with Brian. Had I done so I might have succumbed to alcohol poisoning, such was the formidable line-up of empties that Gardiner, Forey and Patterson used to line up each lunchtime at the Cranley Arms in the Old Brompton Road (don’t look for it — it’s not there any more, but I evoked it, I hope, in my book Deep Time<\/em><\/a>).<\/p>\n

With his gentle manner and west-country burr, Brian was always very kind to me, and as happy talking about his mother’s recipe for lamprey pie as the minutiae of cladistics, or his avocation — trying to find the culprit of the Piltdown Man hoax<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I think it’s fair to say we shall not see his like again.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Just a quick post to announce the death of Professor Brian G. Gardiner (1934-2021), communicated to me just now by his son Nick. Brian was a specialist in the evolution of fishes. He was the last surviving member of the … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1695,1701,1696,1703,1700,1698,1702,1697,1699],"class_list":["post-4559","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-brian-gardiner","tag-cladistics","tag-colin-patterson","tag-dick-jefferies","tag-donn-rosen","tag-hennig","tag-natural-history-museum","tag-peter-forey","tag-phylogenetic-systematics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/cromercrox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4559","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/cromercrox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/cromercrox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/cromercrox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/cromercrox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4559"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/cromercrox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4559\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/cromercrox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4559"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/cromercrox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4559"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/cromercrox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4559"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}