Alexander Gordon Melville

[2] At the 1847 British Association meeting Melville took part in the debate on Lepidosiren, judging it to be an amphibian.

[4] It was during this Oxford period that Hugh Edwin Strickland approached Melville about their joint book on the dodo.

[6] The book's publication provoked a search for fossil evidence of the dodo on Mauritius, to supplement the scanty specimens available.

Later in the year they went together to visit the private collections of George Bax Holmes and William Devonshire Saull, as well as the British Museum, as Mantell pursued his intense quest to undermine the original dinosaur concept of 1842, as advocated by Richard Owen.

[12] In 1854 he made a botanical tour in County Sligo with David Moore,[13] who in the same year introduced Melville to Alexander Goodman More.