Dennis Curry

His scientific contributions earned the recognition of professional colleagues – most notably in the award of the Prestwich Medal of the Geologists' Association in 1966 – as well as a visiting professorship and part-time teaching position at University College London.

[1] Born in Leicester, England, and moving with his family to Brighton as a child, Curry became interested in geology while on fishing trips with his father to Newhaven, East Sussex; he would grow bored and explore the nearby cliffs, looking for fossils.

Between 1942 and 1945 he joined the RAF where he trained recruits in the use of radio and radar equipment; after the war, he returned to the family business where he initially became a joint managing director, then chairman of the company from 1967 until his retirement in 1984.

[5] For many years he was a prominent member of the International Sub-Commission on Palaeogene Stratigraphy; his particular interests included the chalk and overlying Tertiary rocks of Britain, France and Belgium, together with important work establishing the geology underlying the English Channel, which he studied (along with co-workers) using sediment cores collected from research vessels, as well as via seismic and other methods (key papers published from 1962 onwards).

As index species for correlating and establishing the ages of rocks he employed the study of microscopic fossils such as foraminifera and calcareous nannofossils (coccoliths), which he would frequently prepare by concentrating them from their clay residues by washing the samples through cloths in his hotel bedrooms while away on field trips, to the amusement of his more "professional" colleagues, before inspecting them with his hand lens; on several occasions this enabled him to comment on the material just collected in almost "real time" before any of his colleagues had studied them back in their laboratories, as well as greatly reducing the bulk of material to be carried home.

In 1998 he donated his considerable fossil collection comprising in excess of 90,000 specimens, together with his research library, to the Natural History Museum in London,[6] as well as setting up a number of charitable trusts through and after his lifetime in the areas of geological science and maritime activities.

During a period of time in which specialisation in science has become the norm, he has retained a general approach and yet coped with fields ranging from sampling on a micro-scale to coring at sea, from the taxonomy and stratigraphy of micro-fossils to the complexities of the interpretation of radiometric dates.